Intelligent Headphones Know When You’ve Put Them in the Wrong Ear

I think I have weird shapes ears. Maybe not so much ears, but inner ears. Headphones don’t always fit so well, and they immediately do not fit when I mix up the left ear bud from the right one. I am one of those tools that has to stare at the headphones to see which one is left and which one is right, rather than painfully experiment (because of my weird shaped inner ears). Well, those brilliant Japanese scientists have done it again – the Igarashi Design Interfaces Project in Tokyo have invented “Universal Earphones” that know when you’ve fucked up your right from left and automatically switches the audio channel in your headphones (via Cnet).

There is a proximity sensor on one of the earpieces, which measures the distance to the ear. The sensor detects the ear, and points towards the back of your head. If you have it in the wrong ear, it’ll be facing the front of your head, and will know that you’ve messed up. Since it wants to optimize your listening experience, this sensor will trigger an embedded audio circuit which will switch the audio, so that you have the correct mix in the right ear (as in, the “correct” ear). Also brilliant is how if 2 people are sharing one set of headphones, it will allow both audio mixes to play through both the left and right ear piece – which would’ve been useful a hundred times for me in the past. Please invent a time machine next, so that I can fix all of those moments in my life (and maybe a few other ones). No word on release date on the Universal Earphones (or their time machine)