Walk around any city or college campus and headphones seem to be standard issue. You see them in every shape, size, and color with more and more of them being wireless. While wireless Bluetooth headphones can be very convenient, all they are really doing is loosing the cord. The co-founders of Wearhaus sought to find a way to utilize the Bluetooth connection to make headphones more connected. The result is Arc, the world’s first pair of social headphones. The idea is pretty clever; when you listen to music through the Arc app, a “radio station” of sorts is created which anyone with Arc headphones can listen to. Simply double tap on the side of the headphones and you will connect to the nearest station or use the app to browse what people near you are listening to. Arc is designed to connect you to the music around you. Currently 6 of the $200 headphones…
…can be connected at once with a 100ms delay. Wearhaus expects to increase the device number to 63 (so you can start your own silent disco) and the reduce to delay to between 10 and 20ms. As far as the actual device, the rigid design comes in black and white and features LEDs around the ear cup. The LEDs can be customized to display up to 3 colors at a time. The Arc also features a mic, a touch sensitive panel on one of the ear cups for gesture control, and a 10-16 hour battery life. Reviews peg the sound quality of the headphones as decent for the price point.
The idea behind Arc is intriguing but its success is dependent on one thing: the number of devices out there. Why would you buy an Arc over other wireless headphones if you don’t know or run into anyone else using them; the headline feature is completely dependent on market saturation. With only around 3,000 units sold (via crowdsourced fundraising) you aren’t likely to come across many of the headphones anytime soon. It is unfortunate that Wearhaus didn’t decide to license the technology to a major player in the headphone space and instead went at it alone. Such a deal would have basically side-loaded the technology into products people already wanted to buy. With such a sound concept, hopefully Wearhaus is able to find an audience for Arc. On a side note, does Arc reminds anyone else of the Zune’s music sharing feature; hopefully the nine years of wireless communication development since the Zune’s release has made the feature more compelling.
