Ladies and gentlemen, the future of bothering people just trying to get home or to work has arrived. Sony’s research and development division, aptly titled Future Lab, have just debuted their latest creation at SXSW.
SXSW isn’t just about music, movies, and talks. All of the hottest start-ups in tech, as well as lots of veteran companies attend to premiere and preview their new products. A couple years back a ride-sharing service called Uber was the talk of the conference.
This year it’s Concept N, a Bluetooth-powered set of headphones worn around the neck that direct audio up into your ears. If this sounds like a UE Boom that you just wear around your neck, you’re not all that far off.
Except the idea is that you can hear the audio perfectly clearly, whilst everyone around you just hears a muffle as though you were wearing regular headphones. Why wouldn’t you just wear regular headphones? Beats us!
According to The Verge, who tested out the product, the idea behind Concept N is to create a pair of headphones that still let background noise bleed in. They even come with a pair of standard headphones with holes punched in the middle to let more outside noise in.
Basically, you can still be that person who holds conversations with their headphones still in their ears but you’re being, we dunno, slightly less rude? The headphones apparently even respond to voice commands.
Somehow, we feel like this concept works great when you’re at a noisy, international music and tech conference, but would perhaps become a little intrusive and eventually irritating to the people two inches away from you on public transport.
Of course, the whole thing is still a prototype at this point and could just be a new tack-on for the next PlayStation system and not a general-purpose audio product bound for the market, but The Verge notes Sony aren’t the only ones working on earless headphone technology.
