These earbuds let you customize the sounds of your everyday life
Near the beginning of June, the people at Doppler Labs revealed that they have created a way for you to customize the way you hear the world around you. With Here Active Listening System, you can single-out certain sounds surrounding you, and adjust their volume levels to suit your own preferences. All it takes are two wireless earbuds and an app on your phone. In June, they had a Kickstarter launched with a goal of raising $250,000 by July 1. Not only have they surpassed that goal significantly, but they've also received a $17 million Series B investment to help bring Here to the market. Read an excerpt from Business Insider below.
Given Doppler's experience with earplugs, it’s not hard to imagine that a volume knob “on your world” was a feature Doppler would nail with “Here.” And it works. As Kraft adjusted the volume knob on “Here's” smartphone app, the sounds I was hearing went up and down.
But this in itself isn’t revolutionary. Words like that come with Doppler’s ambitions to be able to effectively mute specific kinds of sound: a baby crying, the subway screeching, your partner snoring. “Here” uses a series of algorithms to modify certain frequencies as they enter your ears. The earbuds capture the incoming sound waves, processes the audio in real-time, and play it in your ear without any perceptible delay.
In the version I tested, these custom filters seemed to be a bit of a blunt instrument, but Kraft says this is one area that will be extensively developed during the “incubation” period, when the first version of the product will only be available to the 2,855 backers who pledged over $635,000 in a recent Kickstarter campaign. This stage will last through the end of 2015.
What do you think? Is Here something you would invest in?
