How Augmented Reality Audio Will Let You Soundtrack Your Life
A Elite Sport Bluetooth earphone manufactured by Jabra GN is displayed during the ShowStoppers event at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2017. CES, celebrating its 50th year, will showcase self-driving cars, TVs, drones, robots and a slew of other gadgets. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A renaissance in “Hearables” has begun to reveal how we’ll be able to control the world of sound around us. In a nutshell, these are wireless earbuds that pair with our phones -- think of the movie Her -- but they’re so much more than a hardware upgrade. These “smart headphones,” such as Doppler’s Here One, Nuheara’s IQBuds and Google’s recently-announced Pixel Buds grant an unprecedented degree of precision in “tuning” the soundtrack of our lives -- and in blending our lives into that soundtrack.
Noise-cancelling headphones are designed to uniformly dim the sound around you, and while hearables can do that, they offer something more complex: the ability to “live mix” the world with realtime signal processing. We've been able to EQ our music and devices in the past, but it wasn’t something we could make instantly responsive to the noises of life. Here One and the IQBuds have preset filters for common environments like offices and cities, but the real fun comes in the tinkering. Maybe you want to hear ambient sounds louder than you otherwise would, or you’d prefer to tweak certain ranges, or you just want to add reverb for kicks. That’s the power of smart sound.