The Future of Wearables is Hearables
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Keynote at IdTechEx 2018 in Berlin- Germany The presentation explores the potential of Hearables as the new trendsetter in wearable tech.
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The Future of Wearables is Hearables
- 1. http://thirdsk.in @thirdskinhy joao.bocas@thirdsk.in João Bocas CEO & Co-Founder at Third Skin The Future of Wearables is Hearables
- 3. This is a presentation about communication. About how we communicate with each other. And how our reliance on the text on our screens...
- 12. HEARABLES
- 18. Hy The world’s first always-in hearable See it at Booth 48 contact@thirdsk.in @thirdskinhy
Editor's Notes
- …..is having a negative impact on the way in we interact with each other! Hello my name is João Bocas - co-founder at Third Skin. Now you wouldn’t expect us to do this entire talk purely in text form without verbal communication and/or interaction. And by the way the organisers at IDTechEX expect us to give a presentation in the traditional format. ( with talking ) The point is, you wouldn’t stand for a presentation given in this way.
- Yet increasingly, we routinely accept a greater and greater share of our human interaction being stolen by text on a screen. It can’t have escaped your attention that in the modern world, there is an awful lot of competition for our attention. It wasn’t always this way. It doesn’t have to be this way. We believe there’s a way we can get back to reality.
- We should be able to enjoy communication, entertainment and information without being forced to switch between the real world and the virtual. That is our philosophy, which underpins everything we do at Third Skin. We are in the business of building augmentations to the human experience, not distractions.
- We take for granted the written word. It is such an integral part of the cultural fabric that we can easily forget that it is a relatively recent invention, with aural communication exclusively comprising 99% of human history
- As the legend goes, Moses was the first person to download data from the cloud to his tablet!
- It took over a hundred years from the invention of the telephone before the a landline found its way into over 50% of homes in the developed world. The classic mobile handset we all remember from the 90s….
- As we’ve already discussed, our primary form of communication is, and always has been, the spoken word.…..Our species - in fact, the species that preceded ours - started talking to each other roughly 2 MILLION years ago. Writing things down turned up about 7500 years ago, and transmitted written communication - in the form of telegrams - came into being at best 300 years ago. I think communication needs to get back to the fundamentals of human interaction.
- We should be creating tools / solutions that empower people and improve human interaction for better communication. Because smartphones have taken over our eyes and hands and attention - a 5” piece of glass - with a ten year old interface - that’s taken over our lives.
- So, let me talk about a category of things - smart headphones or hearables as they’re known. These are a step in the right direction - they’re like traditional headphones, but usually voice controlled, and you can make calls, dictate a message, get information that kind of thing. A much more natural way of interacting with our technology.
- In 2013, a startup in Munich called Bragi established themselves as the poster child of hearables. Their first product, the Dash, was the first time that audio interaction had been packaged into this tiny form factor. In their wake, many more have taken up the challenge with mainstream recognition coming with the release of Apple’s Airpods in 2016 - which will probably drive the bulk of the volume of sales for earbuds over the next few years. With the ability to make calls, dictate messages and ask for information from the internet, they represent a new, more streamlined way to interact with our data, and a powerful antidote to our collective smartphone addiction.
- But another way to look at hearables is to consider them more like voice enabled devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home. The thing most lacking in these systems (other than portability) is context awareness - knowing what the user is doing, has done, and might need in the future. These things will be essential in the future as virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri become more sophisticated. The ear is the perfect place to collect data that can inform these systems of important information about you - biometrics, such as heart rate and stress levels, motion information, like your preferred activities, or how tired you are. Over time, you can build up a picture of the user, by essentially “riding along” with them as they go about their day, and this is incredibly powerful for machine learning and artificial intelligence. And that’s why hearables are the future.
- This is all great. However, all available hearables suffer from a problem. Because for the features they give you, they take away something huge. As soon as you put them in your ears - you can’t hear anything. So, you get your hands back from holding a phone all the time, it’s ironic that these state of the art communication devices take away your ability to talk with each other. All because earbuds have to block your ears for you to hear them properly. This is a physical limitation that exists in all traditional earbud and headphone designs, from their invention over a hundred years ago. To put it another way - you can’t have all of their great features without taking them out. So what could be an awesome, always-on tool is ruined by an old flaw.
- About three years ago at Third Skin, we set to work to solve this problem, and came up with a new headphone driver design. They just sit gently in your ears and vibrate, so you can hear sound. Super comfortable, sound as good as regular earbuds, with a shape that doesn’t block your hearing. We call this audio wearable, Hy. Hy is your ears, but upgraded with digital audio - the best of both worlds. It integrates the digital world into your natural senses using voice and sound, to return the aural tradition of human interaction to front and centre of the digital communication age.
- With always-in, always-on personal audio, we can use microphones and audio feedback to allow seamless communication with the online and offline world. Hy is 100% voice controlled, contains microphones to listen to your surroundings, and a host of sensors to respond to you when you need it, including sensors for navigation, health, wellbeing and more. Plus, we can open up a new world of totally immersive entertainment experiences with 3d audio augmented reality. And yes, you can make calls and listen to music.
- This is our vision for the near future of digital communication. With tools like this, we can empower people to be better versions of themselves, more human but better connected than ever. All we need to do is bring the humanity back to technology. Thank you.