 We're here at the third skin right here that I take actual and I'm watching a video With those headphones and it sounds like there's a helicopter above me and a car coming over right now Right here with my stereo headphones Microphones, maybe people can can actually put headphones on and get this experience a little bit. Maybe not. So hi Hi, my name is Simon Austin. I'm a CTO at third skin and We want to put this virtual audio experience augmented audio experience into the real world so What Nicholas was just talking about is the fact that this video the helicopter that he mentioned Isn't actually in this video anyone. It's a virtual object that can actually be added in real time to the environment Yeah, so the helicopter is actually flying around here credit where credit is due This is a demo by a company called super powered audio who do you do a very very good. There you go. There's the plug You do an excellent 3d audio processing software So the idea is is that we could use audio in an augmented fashion to put audio cues and Data and that kind of stuff into the environment of your real here The problem is with a traditional headphone is that they all designs block your natural here so we had to come up with a design that allowed all of the natural sounds come through and Be able to put digital audio on top of that and this is what we came up with so this is a combination of air and bone conduction uses a piezoelectric driver If you put the microphones up against this box, you'll actually be able to hear it working Should be out of here Okay So the so the little metal thing in that essentially it's a v-shaped object goes into the air canal presses against the Air canal walls and then vibrates that sonic frequencies. Is it not like how? Regular bone conducting it is it is The regular bone conducting headphones is first of all they use they try and do the whole sound spectrum With one driver, and it turns to be a very heavy Voice coil driver This is because it's using piezoelectric. It's much much more lightweight for the same power And the same force and also we only do the low frequencies with the piezoelectric We still use a balanced armature driver to do the mid-range and the treble And that way we can get a full spectrum audio, but also You know maintain the quality so Is the idea let's say that you walk around and you can hear something over there like a virtual thing Yeah That's what well a few potential examples So like the one you just said if we've got if you're navigating around a town that you've never been to before You could just place an audio beacon There's GPS located that you just walk towards instead of having to follow You know turn left turn right walk down the street across the road, whatever But there's loads of other applications So we could do for example conference calling where the people in the conference call are actually located in space around you and because we've put an inertial measurement unit with gyroscopes and Composers in the device is that the device this is the device this this is so the black parts are the The the actual drivers themselves, where did you put them you put them into your ears they go in there Yeah, so so as a model of the air and they literally go as a V shape just straight into the air They don't go any deeper than a cotton bud that you usually use to clean your ears All the batteries Bluetooth radios everything else sit behind your ears and So as I say we've got like an inertial measurement unit, so it knows which direction your head's pointing So we can actually move the sound source in real time around you, so it tracks your head movements Is it with a gyro? Yeah with gyros so this an accelerometer gyros accelerometer and magnetometer compass Yeah Because we've got such big batteries in there But you can wear these all day because they don't affect your hearing So you have to have big batteries and with big batteries We get the chance to put in loads of sensors loads of extra stuff because there's microphones in there. We can be talking to virtual assistants All the time so this is basically like a wearable Amazon echo I think it would be awesome if you could combine this with a Micro-display Working on it. I mean no, we're not working on it and that definitely isn't information Because it'd be so cool because okay, I'm looking over here, but you have your assistant on the left Hey, come on because actually what you're doing is we're going to a destination But you have a guy in front of you. Yeah, and maybe she's around the corner. Yeah Maybe you're looking in the wrong place I might not might not even be voiced there might be I've heard the phrase earcon like icon So an earcon being a sound that represents a certain thing so say in the facility we're in at the moment the facility itself could have curated content whereby There is a beacon where the toilet is there are beacons where the fire exits are that kind of stuff and Yeah, you could always hear those around you. It wouldn't necessarily be voice They would just be sound effects that become familiar because that represents the thing that it represents Behind three walls and up two flights of stairs because I think the smart glass are great to augment but this With the sound your technology is gonna accommodate even more. Yeah, it's gonna be an extra I'd say that actually we can do immersive augmented reality better with this now Than any of the visual guys can the technologies. I've had the chance to play with some of the industrial solutions and with HoloLens for example and the technology is very very impressive But we're still talking about very small Slightly headache-inducing Yeah, whereas when you first put that on you you were convinced that helicopter was there and if we were doing that in the real world We could make these augmentations to reality as real as you want them to be I think they differently Would benefit from your augmentation. Yeah, and let's say the the smart glass Would mostly be off because it is confusing but sometimes it appears something important Yeah, sure, but the sound might be you know for example your your hearing You've got about a 15 degree resolution on where you're hearing can actually determine the direction of a sound So maybe a visual marker is a better better way to do that the problem is But not really a problem for us is we can do it now and we're just waiting for the visual guys to catch up They need to catch up. How about Can you also have an algorithm to cancel? Noise around yeah, so obviously one of the big things that differentiates these from other headphones is Good or not That it doesn't block any sound at all and a lot of people say you know You can just flip we've got we've got an active noise cancellation solution in here that listens to the outside world And tries to cancel out using the drivers Not our solution. It's it's a well-tested Industry standard chip that a lot of people are using we think we can get down to about a 30 decibel reduction in certain frequency bands But certainly enough to turn a conversation in a loud room into a nicely focused conversation between two people with the rest of room dialed down So what is the third skin? That's like third skin is the name of the company the product I should probably have said very early on is high time high h h y The the elusive triple-on tonder It's in the company's third skin the idea being that the clothes that you wear should fit you like a second skin The technology you wear should fit you like a third it should be seamless and well integrated into your sensory experience So you imagine a world where like everybody's using your technology? Absolutely. Yeah I mean this is this is the first iteration of the first product that we've developed we've got We've got ideas in the pipeline for an ecosystem of Various wearable computing devices that should should be totally natural to wear and Eventually eliminate our reliance on holding a five-inch piece of glass in our hand to get all of our information through Yeah, and yeah, that's that's the ambition. It's like you're wet, right? Is that a pebble? It is a pebble like me. RIP. Yeah Greatest wearable ever created did everything it needed to and nothing more. I got mine on gumtree. It's still available. Okay, still available on gumtree It's not as previously major that's a that's a demo from from another company, but the the underlight the underlying algorithms What are called hrtf so head related transfer functions, which is how you take a Mono sound and a position and convert it into a stereo sound that gives your brain all the cues It needs to work out where that sound is coming from. That's that's a well-established technology That is getting progressively better and better and can be done in real time All right, and this is how soon how soon okay, so available to pre-order on indiegogo right now. Yeah Sorry, so how's it going? The indiegogo campaign went really well. I it actually completed last year and Yeah, we've been doing R&D since then we're We've had the usual delays that hardware startups have but we're planning to ship in queue for this year So how many people on indiegogo? 600 600 orders. Yeah 600 orders. So, you know, we've got you totally successful. We think totally successful Yeah, how soon you hope that it's ready about key for this year keep shipping. Yeah, so and yeah before Christmas I honestly can't remember it's been a while, but it was affordable, right? Yeah, I mean this is mid-range headphone process in the retail price. How much? Somewhere between 200 and 250 or but we haven't completely nailed that down yet. All right, okay and making headphones is also important to have a lot of like It's a high-precision industry, right? Yeah, it's high tech. Yeah, it is Absolutely We're standing on the shoulders of giants with all of the stuff that's in here with the exception of the driver that we've got and we put Together everything else is off the shelf. We're just putting it together in a new way and it's not like these things weren't possible before It's just they were wasn't really any point doing it before if you can't wear the headphones all day Then why bother putting in all the sensors and all the other cool stuff? So we managed just to enable this this what we hope is a next step All over the UK we have no fixed abode, but I'm based in the Midlands my Co-founder Joao is in Brian. We've got engineers in London Yeah, we are a virtual company at the moment