Augmented reality is also coming

Share your earplugs Being with someone is disgusting in every important aspect.There must be a compelling reason to want to wedge another person’s Waxy nuggets Into your external auditory canal. Such as love, or unbearable long-distance flights without other options (the two are not mutually exclusive). Or, to some extent, a shared experience that requires two or more people to hear the same audio track at the same time.

For entrepreneur Jonathan Wegener (Jonathan Wegener), this is the culmination of a series of events that prompted him to build a new application that needs to be shared earphone. Back in the early 2010s, when Wegener was building Memory application TimeHop, He also digs out Improv Everywhere’s Mp3 experiment in New York, which is a “participatory audio experience” that can deliver coordinated movement instructions to thousands of people wearing headphones. He thinks the Mp3 experiment is “very cool”, whether it is private or public: a voice whispers in your ear, and when you participate in the same public performance, you will feel the friendship with strangers.

A few years later, when Apple’s AirPods came out, Wegener, like millions of other people, was shocked by the easy wireless audio they provided. He saw two friends in Greece, a couple, separating a pair of AirPods so that they could listen to music together.

So he started to build his next thing: PairPlay, which is an ingenious but obvious Apple “AirPlay” game. This is an iOS application that can guide partners, friends or children in their own home through imaginary scenes. This is part of a larger trend in which audio-focused entrepreneurs are taking advantage of a perfect technological storm-from increasingly complex processors to sensors that track people’s movements, to provide very good Personal equipment for sound.

In PairPlay, the sound oozes Andy Pudcombe——The level of calm tells people to face their AirPod partners, and then provide two different versions of the scene, one for each earpiece. There are a series of episodes that are more similar to scenes than downloadable podcasts. In one episode, one of the participants became a robot. In another episode of the series, both of them became secret agents. Another simulated zombie apocalypse urges the player to run around the house, close the windows, and find a hiding place, without knowing whether the opponent has been “infected.” (It was a bit close in the Covid era.)

I tested the beta version of PairPay with a WIRED colleague and asked him to try it with his partner who just moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. (Welcome to Silicon Valley! Try this app now.) Watching other people participate is almost as fun as trying the app yourself. They faced each other, closed their eyes, and then opened them again. Then they ran around this place, grabbed the pillows and put them in different rooms, smiling awkwardly, trying what I thought were dancing. After a few minutes, they took off the AirPods. A friend of mine admitted it was funny, but her partner thought it lacked a completely unthinking narrative. He said that using the application felt silly, although he admitted that it was the point.

PairPlay is free to download and all content is free. Currently. It is easy to see how the company will provide subscription content. (If you don’t have an iPhone and AirPods yet, then it’s not so “free” because you need these two items to use the app.) It is only available in English, unfortunately, for people with hearing impairments That said, there is actually no built-in accessibility features in the app, such as subtitles.