[New Scientist]

…

Place the earphone on the right and the sensor points to the back of your head, detecting the ear behind it, while swapping to the left ear means the sensor points in front of you into the open air. A small embedded audio circuit swaps channels when the sensor detects a mismatch.

These new earphones also solve another common listening problem – sharing your ‘phones with a friend, which – as anyone who has listened to just one half of a Beatles song (or any other track with hard audio panning) knows – isn’t the most satisfying musical experience.

When worn by a single user the Universal Earphones run a weak electrical current from one side to the other, but this connection is broken if the earphones are shared between two users, causing each speaker to play both left and right channels through at once.

The researchers will present their work at Intelligent User Interface conference in Lisbon, Portugal later this month, but they also have further plans for improving ordinary earphones, including skin conductance sensors that detect whether the earphones are actually in your ear, which would let them automatically pause or resume your music on removal or insertion.

Read the full story here: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/02/universal-earphones-solve-your.html

[Time Magazine]

…then there’s Sony’s Personal 3D Viewer HMZ-T1. The $799.99 gadget is, essentially, a high-definition video View-Master based on 21st-century technology. Instead of looking at the View-Maser’s two tiny frames of film, you look at twin OLED screens which deliver 720P video from an external source. Built-in headphones pump stereo sound into your ears.

The HMZ-T1 is unique, but it’s also a fresh take on an idea Sony first unveiled in 1997. That original version was called the Glasstron; it used LCD screens and didn’t do 3D or HD. The technology has come a long way in the past 15 years.

…

The HMZ-T1′s dual OLEDs added up to a beautifully colorful, detailed image, and the 3D effect was–this is the first time I’ve used this word in conjunction with 3D–excellent. Instead of wincing and feeling queasy, I marveled at how sharp and subtle it was. Toy Story 3 looked better than it did when I saw it in a theater in 2010. 2D Blu-rays were pleasing, too.

The viewer’s OLEDs may be dinky, but they’re so close to your eyes that they blend into a picture that looks far larger than it is. (Sony says it’s the equivalent of a 750″ screen.) The headphones block out ambient noise, making the whole effect even more enveloping.

Gaming in 3D was also a blast: As I ran around whomping bad guys in Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters, the extra dimensionality made it seem a little less like a video game and a little more like virtual reality, (Many current games are 3D-friendly; they’re identified as such on their cases.)

…

… the quality of the picture makes this a notable product. It provides the rest of the industry a standard to shoot for–and gives skeptics like me definitive proof that 3D video isn’t inherently unpleasant.
Read the full story here: http://techland.time.com/2012/02/02/sonys-highly-personal-surprisingly-decent-3d-viewer/