Tech Trend 247

Just as with vision, no two people have the same hearing, so why should headphones be one size fits all?

Off the back of a successful Kickstarter that has so far earned A$1.2 million ($875,395), Melbourne-based startup Nura has created a unique pair of headphones that aim to adapt sound exactly for your ears. On Monday, Nura cofounders Luke Campbell and Kyle Slater dropped by the Mashable Australia office to give a demonstration of the product and talk us through the technology.

Starting in 2015, Campbell and Slater, along with cofounder Dragan Petrovic, decided to try and build a genuinely adaptive pair of headphones. "We all hear differently," Campbell pointed out. "If we both stand in front of a speaker, we both hear different versions of the same song."

The science behind the technology is based on the fact your ears don't just listen to sound, they also produce it. The team have adapted an otoacoustic emissions test, which measures the sounds created by the inner ear when the cochlea responds to sound, and put it inside the headphones. 

A sensitive microphone is built-in to pick up and analyse which sounds you hear well and which you didn't, allowing the headset to automatically be retuned to fill in any musical black spots.

The headphones have an in-ear and over-ear design, much like having earbuds inside a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. The in-ear piece measures hearing and plays mostly mid and high tones, Campbell said, while the bass plays predominantly though the over-ear component.

According to Slater, adaptive headphones could also help protect our hearing. "One of the reasons people listen to music so loud at the moment is because the headphones don't match their hearing very well," Slater said. "People turn it up because they want their earbuds to play better bass, and of course, at the same time, play really loud high frequency sounds that damage your ears."

As a bonus, the team have tried to account for that fact that feeling a song's beat is often a tactile sensation. The headphones have a special "Kick It" mode that increases the bass to powerful levels in contact with your skin. "It will feel like you're right in front of the speaker, but you'll have crystal clear, safe sound," Campbell explained. 

The headphones, which will come with wired and wireless versions, should be ready for market in April 2017. A pair will cost $399 (A$533) direct from Nura's website.

Trying out personalised sound

To give Nura's prototype headphones a rigorous test, I called in our Watercooler reporter Johnny Lieu, who is a DJ after hours, to also give them a try. 

The prototype we trialled currently has the signal processing technology as a separate component, but it will eventually be built into the ear cup. 

Nura's hearing test, which measures your relative sensitivity to 11 different frequencies, takes 30 seconds to a minute through a smartphone app. It's a little uncomfortable to listen to higher and higher frequencies, but they don't last long, and once set up, you can listen to music on any app. 

According to Slater, the calibration process should be repeated every six months to account for hearing changes.

Trialling the headphones on two songs, Björk's "Venus as a Boy" and J. Cole's "G.O.M.D.," it was clear the Nura headphones offered a much richer sound. Compared to my basic Samsung earbuds, the J. Cole track, for example, had much more detail and was more balanced. The Nura product also gave Björk's song a much broader soundstage and let me hear more of the instrumentation.

For my taste, the earbuds felt a little claustrophobic because of how far they protruded into the ear. Slater suggested the final product would be less invasive, however, as the trial unit relies on commercially available ear tips that will be customised in the for-market version.

While Lieu was skeptical at first, he was left convinced. "Listening to Bjork's 'Venus As A Boy' the Nura's brought exceptionally bright but not harsh highs and pleasantly warm mids," he said.

"Perhaps the proof the technology works is through listening to different sound profiles in the app. Ariel's profile had noticeably duller highs and mids, thanks to her ear's supposed sensitivity to higher frequencies. It fares much better compared to the similarly priced Bose's QuietComfort 25, which has noticeably dismal sound quality. 

"My MEElectronics M6 PRO in-ear headphones fared better with the mids and lows, but it's the highs where the Nura smokes the rest of the competition."

In his view, the "Kick It" function added a a significant amount of bass in the outer cups and a touch in the in-ear drivers. "Kick It was admittedly awesome in the few minutes I tried it, but it could be fatiguing after an extended period of time," he added.

Ultimately, this is a promising product that will leave you wondering why you used lacklustre earbuds for so long. Nevertheless, while the Nura headphones feel perfect for sitting in a dark room and getting lost in an album, they feel a little inappropriate for street wear. The sound is so immersive it could honestly be disorientating for newcomers to audiophilia.

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Who out there is excited for a new Windows 10 Mobile phone? Did your eyes just light up and your heart skip a beat? You're in the very small minority that cares about Windows 10 Mobile then.

For some reason, the Japanese company NuAns is kickstarting a Windows 10 Mobile phone. It would be a great idea if Windows 10 Mobile was relevant at all, but it's not. With only 0.7% of the worldwide smartphone marketshare as of Q1 2016 (that's worse than the 1.7% ending Q3 2015), according to Gartner, the mobile platform is as a good as dead.

Even Microsoft knows it, which is why we're seeing the company pivot towards providing its excellent apps and services on iOS and Android instead.

With so little marketshare and more importantly, such a puny selection of apps, you have to wonder who will buy this phone.

The dream of carrying just your Windows 10 phone and using Continuum and a dock to transform it into a desktop PC was an idealistic pursuit, but ultimately one nobody cared for. Each of us is a multiple device person with each device serving a different purpose. 

With so little marketshare, and more importantly, such a puny selection of apps, you have to wonder what NuAns is thinking with its campaign for the NEO phone. The company's asking for $725,000 to produce its phone, but who the heck is going to buy it?

The niche guy you say! Well, of course, Windows 10 Mobile is a niche — not by choice, but by Microsoft's own failure.

Like a thick old Nokia Lumia smartphone, the NEO isn't competing with the ultra-thin flagship iPhones and Android phones on the market.

As a phone, the NEO is decidedly midrange. It has a 5-inch HD display (1,280 x 720), Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage (expandable up to 128GB via microSD card), and a 3,350 mAh battery. On the back is a 13-megapixel f/2.0 aperture camera and on the front is a 5-megapixel f/2.4 aperture camera. Yeah...not exciting. But at least it has a reversible USB-C port!

Instead of performance, NuAns is banking on customizability. The NEO has two back cover panels that are interchangeable and the company hopes to sell a variety of different materials for each cover (i.e. wood, plastic, leather, etc.). There's even a cover with a slot for storing cash or credit cards.

Don't want to buy their cover panels? No problem. The company's planning to make the designs available for users to 3D print for themselves.

Not to totally poo-poo over NuAns — I applaud them for taking this risk — but they are almost certainly destined for failure. 

Windows 10 doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of gaining popularity and catching up to iOS and Android.

The NEO phone is something Windows phone fans needed years ago. And even if it had launched then, it's questionable if it would have found any success at all seeing as Windows Phone 7 and 8 were flops as well.

To NuAns, I say good luck. There are still 38 days left to the NEO phone's campaign and the company's already received more than $37,000 in crowdfunding at the time of this writing. 

Who knows, maybe the phone will get funded and the few people who backed it for $399.99 (early bird special) will be able to enjoy a device that has swappable panels.

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SINGAPORE — Getting massaged all day by a jacket you can wear sounds like an insane genius idea.

It's just crazy enough to have won Tware, the Singaporean startup behind the AiraWear jacket, more than 1,000 backers and $150,000 on Kickstarter. 

We got our hands on the latest prototype of the AiraWear jacket, which Tware says has undergone improvements since the earlier version it showed at CES.

The jacket is basically a regular hoodie with an inflatable vest zipped into it. The vest has six protruding plastic nubs located along both sides of the spine, from shoulders to lower back — the typical back-massage zones.

As the vest inflates behind each accupressure point, the nub presses into your back and shoulder muscles, mimicking kneading fingers.

The hoodie pairs with an app that shows you which parts of the jacket are inflating to exert pressure. You can slider controls to adjust the intensity.

For such a simple design, the jacket's massage feels surprisingly decent. I like my massages strong, and on maximum strength. The AiraWear was powerful enough to work out some painful spots along my lower back.

That said, the AiraWear isn't perfect yet. Its nubs move in and out as the air pads behind them are inflated and deflated, but they can't make circular motions the way an actual massage therapist, or some other massage devices, can. 

The mechanism isn't capable of vibration — a function common on many massage chairs — but Tware said it may build that into a future model based on requests for it.

The jacket also works best if you sit in a chair with a back during use, so your body weight can help push the nubs into your muscles.

And even though the jacket is touted as a discreet massager you can wear at your desk, when inflated it does give you kind of an unflattering, Hunchback-of-Notre-Dame look. It also makes audible hissing noises as air is pumped in and released during the massage, making it much less likely that we're going to be enjoying secret massages during boring work meetings.

Still, it's a smart idea that will likely find more than a handful of satisfied buyers. Tware says the jacket will eventually list for $249. Its battery lasts for about three hours of use and is chargeable by micro USB, so massage addicts can hook it up to a portable charger and use it all day.

Before it made the AiraWear, Tware also produced a vest targeted at children with autism, which tightens around the wearer to simulate the feeling of being hugged. The company says it has sold some 600 of those jackets globally so far.

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