Someone got me onto the Inception app today: an augmented reality experience that uses your iDevice’s microphone to live-process sound to simulate an Inception-like dream.
It’s really quite an awesome piece of software and not just a novelty but potentially a useless tool although perhaps not in its current game-like mode.
Some workplaces ban headphones either because they expect staff to be able to hear and answer other people’s phones (a productivity killer) or so the boss can interrupt a team member at will (another productivity killer).
I see here an opportunity to have an iPhone/iPod music player which is integrated with the microphone to help make the headphones selectively transparent whilst listening to music. Through frequency analysis the app could tell if someone is speaking towards the person wearing the headphones in which case it would pass-thru the audio at a volume appropriate for the level of the music being listened to or block the ambient noise.
As for the issue with answering other people’s phones: I think we need to stop putting phones on every single desk in offices. Nearly every single time when I take a call for myself or for others in my bay it’s not an urgent issue and should have been emailed through so it could be handled at our convenience and it’s not worth having a phone that kills productivity daily just for that one urgent issue a year that needs my immediate attention … and even then, an email would have sufficed if email alerts could be overridden for ‘high priority’ flagged items.
Anyway, I digress. I think there’s an opportunity for making music listening and headphone wearing more palatable for office environments and I think the Inception app is a good proof of concept for the idea so check it out!
