Dyson’s latest headphones have a built-in air purifier
By Funnyvot Auditorial - - 5 Mins Read
The Zone, a pair of noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones with air purifying technology built-in, owing to a strange-looking magnetic face shield, is Dyson's first foray into headphones. It's the oldest and most ambitious product the company has ever created.
Dyson isn't announcing specific details like price or specifications (such as how much the headphones weigh or how long the battery will last) at this time, and today's presentation is only an early glimpse of the Zone headphones ahead of a fall release date.
The Zone's purpose is to make city living more comfortable by attempting to reduce both air and noise pollution.
Dyson doesn't reinvent the wheel with the air purification component of the Zone. Instead, it compresses the company's existing air filtration technology into a new shape.
Despite being a new product category for Dyson, the headphone section is a little more typical. The purpose of the Zone, according to the business, was to make "true" replicas of a musician's original songs.
Air purification
Dyson's engineering expertise enabled designers to develop Dyson’s first wearable device. With a 2-stage purification system capable of filtering city fumes and pollutants, wherever you are, you can breathe purified air.
This machine is designed to work when you're walking around outside and all the pollutants that you come across there include particulates, PM2.5, and gaseous pollutants like NO2.
Dyson spent a lot of time developing purification systems to go into people's homes and the company wants to provide that same benefit for someone when they're on a tube train commuting.
An electrostatic charge on the media actually attracts the dust particles out of the air and that means the Dyson Zone is fitted with a filter that is much slimmer.
Contact-free visor
The visor channels a continuous stream of purified air to your nose and mouth, without touching your face. For natural, comfortable breathing with no stuffiness.
The visor is cleverly designed to sit very close to the face without actually touching it and preventing any crosswinds contaminating the air. The clean air is traveling around and then exits through this mesh into the clean air bubble.
Developers worked on some very specific mesh that helps diffuse our airflow across the whole breathing zone. They quickly realized there were no established ways of measuring the kind of performance they were trying to achieve so designers had to develop their own test methods.
A test was set up using a fake human head called Frank that tests how much of the clean air is getting to a fake pair of lungs. Developers program them to breathe as a human does in a sinusoidal fashion, simulating different exertion levels.
So whether you're sitting at your desk in a low-breathing mode or whether you're jogging to the bush in a high-breathing mode, enough clean air is getting to the user in all of those scenarios.
High-fidelity audio
Built using Dyson's first premium audio technology, the Zone delivers an immersive, high-fidelity sound, with advanced active noise canceling to block out unwanted disturbance.
There are a number of ways that you can deal with external noises. Developers used the state-of-the-art Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) technology. There are microphones on the outside of the headphones that actually listen to all the noises that are going around the user and then an algorithm can cancel those noises by the time they get to the ear.
The head and torso simulator is a nice piece of equipment to emulate the acoustic properties of humans. Getting the cushion to seal really well around the ear gives you that isolation at higher frequencies. So finding the right clamping force, choosing the right material for that cushion is the key to the acoustic performance of the product.
To make sure the best sound quality possible is achieved, a really large audio cavity was engineered and fitted with the best quality speaker driver available.
Working with the large kind of frequency response that we have in the Dyson Zone, they’ve optimized the playback to be as close as possible to the sound as recorded.
Innovation during the pandemic
The Dyson Zone is perhaps one of the most intriguing devices we'll see this year from Dyson. We still don't know a lot of important factors, such as the pricing and battery life.
While mask-wearing has been more common in recent years, we'll have to wait and see if customers are willing to accept this impressive product.