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Augmented reality is sort of exclusively related to vision, however it doesn’t need to be. Audio company Bose announced a project it’s calling “Bose AR” at this 12 months’s SXSW festival, and it showed off a pair of prototype glasses that reveal what sound-based AR might feel and appear like. The company plans to ship 10,000 of those glasses to developers and manufacturers this summer, with the intent of partnering with other eyewear firms.
Bose AR devices mix data from embedded motion sensors with GPS information out of your phone, which they connect with via Bluetooth. GPS detects where a user is, and the nine-axis sensor can determine which direction they’re looking and moving. Small, focused speakers pipe sound toward the wearer’s ears. I could hear audio from a number of feet away at a really loud volume in an enclosed room, however the sound was totally self-contained once I went outside. App developers can tag locations to trigger specific audio cues, or they will just use the motion sensors as a head-based gesture control interface.
Bose has established a $50 million fund for Bose AR developers, and it lists 11 software partners already, including Yelp, TripAdvisor, and fitness company Strava. Bose category business manager Santiago Carvajal mentioned firms like Ray-Ban and Warby Parker as potential hardware partners but says no person is locked down yet. “We are in conversations with a lot of wearable hardware manufacturers within the eyewear space,” he says. The price remains to be undetermined, and can obviously vary depending on who’s making the glasses.
1/7Photo by Adi Robertson / The Verge
The company desires to put Bose AR in as many sorts of devices as possible. A big display rack showed bike helmets, prescription glasses, and earbuds as examples of possible future products. It had two working AR-equipped devices at SXSW: a 3D-printed set of sunglasses and a modified version of its QuietComfort30 headphones, known provisionally because the QC3X. The glasses apparently last three to 4 hours on a charge, but Bose wants six to eight hours on a industrial version.
Carvajal says Bose is especially all in favour of glasses because they’re more comfortable and socially acceptable for constant wear than earbuds, and so they don’t signal that you simply’re busy or unapproachable. “We’ve been wearing glasses for years, they’re accepted by everybody,” he says.
Augmented reality glasses are literally often known for being uncomfortable and socially unacceptable, but Intel recently announced a set of natural-looking smart glasses. Bose AR can go even further because its lenses don’t need to handle any type of image projection. The prototype sunglasses are completely ordinary-looking from the front. They bulk up on the side due to built-in speakers, the motion sensors, and a touchpad. But they’re still very light, and Carvajal says that weight shouldn’t change much in a production version.
These are audio devices meant for looking, not only listening
Bose built a number of easy apps for SXSW, which work pretty much, if not perfectly. The most impressive demonstration was an augmented reality tour of the bars and restaurants along one Austin street. It worked like visual augmented reality, but with sound as an alternative of a heads-up display: you take a look at a constructing and tap a touchpad in your temple, and so they offer a sentence or two about what’s inside. The locations weren’t very precise, and it occasionally told me about things that were toward the sting of my field of view, as an alternative of what I used to be trying to take a look at. But it was close enough to look mainly accurate — like having someone walking beside you and declaring landmarks.
I’m unsure exactly how precise developers could make this tracking. Carvajal told me that Bose AR could probably tell whenever you were a particular statue in a park, as an example, but not a small plaque on a wall. It’s not as ambitious as phone- and glasses-based AR projects that “pin” virtual objects to extremely specific locations. Bose AR probably couldn’t support something like translating a particular check in real time, unless a hardware manufacturer adds a camera, which generally opens up quite a lot of recent problems.
Low-risk and never ridiculous
That said, there actually was a language app for the QC3X headphones. It offered a number of French or Spanish phrases once I checked out a subway or hotel — or at SXSW, beacons simulating those things. Voice recognition let me give it commands, or repeat phrases and get feedback. (I’m, it seems, very bad at French.)
One demo offered a more on a regular basis use case. Again with headphones, I selected between several playlists by turning my head, as if they were physical objects specified by front of me. Directional sound faded out and in as I looked in several directions. When I went to “work” and “the gym” (represented here by Bluetooth beacons, positioned close together for convenience) it might ask if I wanted to alter my playlist, and routinely adjust sound settings like noise cancellation levels. Headphone firms like Bragi are already using gesture controls, but Bose AR looks like it could offer more sophisticated options.
Bose AR’s usefulness will rely on what developers do with it, and hearing anyone consult with you doesn’t feel as amazingly high-tech as a hologram. But depending on how much the system costs, it offers a fresh and low-risk way of fascinated with augmented reality. It could also easily complement a visible display since visual and audio AR each rely on understanding motion and site. For now, it’s only a pair of AR glasses that don’t look ridiculous — which remains to be a rare achievement.
Update 3PM ET: A Bose spokesperson says a previous representative’s statement that the corporate planned to sell a self-branded industrial version of its glasses was incorrect. Plans currently only include Bose development kits and partner devices.
Photography by Adi Robertson / The Verge
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