Air-purifying headphones with active noise cancelling | Hacker News Reader

Air-purifying headphones with active noise cancelling

dyson.com

92 pointsbribroder106 comments

A.K.A 'Snot Cannon'

I can see this has having the similar type of negative public health impact as the Dyson Blade dryers in public toilets, simply circulating fecal matter further in an enclosed space.

Naomi Wu with the critique: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/150912514143903334...

What's the issue with the dryers? You use them to dry already-washed hands and the dryers themselves aren't very close to the toilets.

Bacteria -> Your hands

Your hands -> Windstream

Windstream -> Goes everywhere

It's not even about Dyson dryers, but dryers in general

It's meant for hands that were just washed. I understand that not everyone does a great job washing, but I have a hard time believing this poses a real threat..

Let's look at some studies:

> Participants washed their gloved hands with a suspension of MS2 bacteriophage and hands were dried with one of the three hand-drying devices. [...] Over a height range of 0·15–1·65 m, the JAD [jet air dryer] dispersed an average of >60 and >1300-fold more plaque-forming units (PFU) compared to the WAD [warm air dryer] and PT [paper towels] (P < 0·0001), respectively.[1]

Okay, but I'm sure just-washed hands aren't all that dirty, right?

> This observational study was conducted to evaluate [...] hand hygiene practices among college students. [...] Overall, 72.9% of students washed their hands, 58.3% practiced hand hygiene (using either soap or hand sanitizer), and 26.1% washed their hands adequately.[2]

I couldn't find any epidemiological studies, but this feels like good enough of a reason to stick to other options considering these things are a solution in search of a problem anyway.

[1]: https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jam...

[2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18538703/

But you just washed your hands. Where are the bacteria coming from?

"washed"

Have you seen people in the real world?

Even assuming they're washed correctly (entire song thing with all the trimmings), a bathroom sink is not a steriliser.

You’re lucky if people even make a show of washing their hands. If they wash them well, then you have just met a unicorn. And even people who do normally wash their hands well sometimes run into issues like there not being any goddamn soap stocked (in the same bathroom, 3 days in a row).

Don’t use the air blowers; just let your hands air dry if there’s no paper towels. It doesn’t take very long and has been basically my standard practice for about 10 years now.

That assumes everyone thoroughly washes their hands, which is unlikely. Dyson hand dryers, specifically, always have a nasty puddle of water at the bottom of their drying "crevice" in busy bathrooms.

The sheer number of people I've seen running their hands through water for a second before moving onto the drier was alarmingly high in 2019 (pre-covid).

I don't know how much that's changed, but I wouldn't expect the change to be particularly meaningful, sadly.

Don't worry, that number hasn't changed

> Dyson hand dryers, specifically, always have a nasty puddle of water at the bottom of their drying "crevice" in busy bathrooms.

That's just a bonus, the main issue with them as other comments have noted is that they shove the water off of your hands using their "air blades".

This aerosolises a significant fraction of that water (the rest goes and collects in the puddle you speak of), spreading it all over the room.

More classic driers primarily work by evaporation, and furthermore direct the air stream downwards (to the floor) rather than sideways (across the room).

Doesn't matter how well you wash your hands, you still have to touch the door handle to get out (they usually open inwards) and some grotty germbags will have poopified that handle 50 times over before you get to touch it.

The bathrooms with Dyson driers near me open inwards but have foot openers,¹ as well as the other bathrooms with paper towels inside and waste baskets just outside (so you can use the towel to open the door before tossing it).

I was hoping that COVID would trigger a contactless revolution in bathrooms where I don't need to touch a pooped up door handle to get out... But sadly seems not a thing

No one washes their hands perfectly (e.g., ready for surgery), so when you dry them there’s still a lot of bacteria present. Dyson dryers aerosolize those particulates, and they do it far more than other dryers.

Think of it this way — they don’t dry your hands, they blow the water off. Where does the water go? All over the bathroom. Dyson dryers disperse fluids up to 3 meters away.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/dyson-dryers-hurl-60...

To be fair, other hand dryers only do better on this metric because they don't actually remove the water from your hands.

Regular hand dryers (hot/dry airflow) literally make the water evaporate off your hands. How is the water not removed?

Ask my wet pants and the line of people behind me every time waiting to do the same move.

I cannot even count all the times when I went to use these dryers at always-packed IKEA and immediately got a mouthful of water droplets. No idea if they came from my hands or somebody else’s. TBH I don’t want to know. I just dry my hands on my clothing now.

This just sounds extremely manipulative and I don't see how I can trust this opinion. It also seems wrong:

the average person expels 300-500ml of this fluid a day in the form of a fine mist- an aerosol. You can see it in cold weather.

That's condensation from humidity in the air you breathed out. That's why you can only see it in cold weather. Does it really contain viruses? Any data on this?

Is this a joke? Where have you been the last two years?

Do you know something I don't? My understanding it that aerosols that leave your mouth when you speak can obviously contain virus. But there's no logical reason why simple warm air that has no aerosols suspended in it that gets cooled down and condenses into particles would contain virus.

Your breath (what you exhale) always contains substantial amounts of moisture (and yes, potentially virions). It does not matter if you speak or not. It does not matter if the environment is cold or not. There is no "simple warm air" out of your lungs.

I agree with mtn_nerd, you must be trolling. Considering your choice of words, you're probably well aware of that.

The breath you see in cold weather is not aerosols but condensed moisture. I don't know how pointing out this trivial fact can be construed as trolling.

There is a large, whiny portion of HN who were so severely injured by the COVID-19 fear porn that they uncritically consumed that they see viruses in their sleep still, two years later. It’s quite sad.

Moisture floating out of your mouth is aresolized moisture.

Then why do you only see it in cold weather? This is primary school physics...

Because in cold weather the aerosolized moisture condenses.

That is a completely nonsensical sentence.

This seems like a stretch. Barring some rather unexpected effect, this device will not change the amount of aerosolized pathogen emitted by a person. At most it will change the distribution — the aerosols will be presumably be mixed into a larger volume of air. So maybe they will spread somewhat father, but, if so, they’ll be more dilute.

[0] To the extent the wearer’s breath is sucked back through the filter, the total emitted pathogen load will be reduced.

It is not a stretch. This is why many hospitals require staff to wear an N95 (a hard shell mask—not a surgical mask—in order to prevent as little leakage as possible) underneath a PAPR. PAPRs (with the exception of the CleanSpace Halo if using a special adapter) do not have source control. (I personally use an Optrel e9000x PAPR with an N95 underneath for source control. If not able to use a PAPR such as on an airplane, I wear a valve-free P100 mask [MSA Advantage 900] over an authentic KF94 mask [see: https://behealthyusa.net/ for KF94]. Yes, I am immunocompromised...)

This Dyson device does not have source control, and yes, it is a super-spreader device.

There is proof that such devices are super spreading tools: hospital administrators wore a blow up costume in to a Kaiser Hospital ER and caused a huge COVID-19 outbreak.

This was when contact tracing was in effect in California.

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/kaiser-san-jose-outbre...

Comments on r/Medicine subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/kpjs8s/inflatable...

> This Dyson device does not have source control, and yes, it is a super-spreader device.

By this standard, my unmasked mouth is a super-spreader device. (Of course it is! Most super spreader events occurred without the assistance of any particular technology except perhaps walls and a ceiling. Sometimes technology is involved. For example, COVID pretty clearly spreads through inadequately filtered HVAC systems, but that seems to be just because it moves air to people that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten there.)

> There is proof that such devices are super spreading tools: hospital administrators wore a blow up costume in to a Kaiser Hospital ER and caused a huge COVID-19 outbreak.

What proof? I see no evidence whatsoever that exactly the same superspreader event wouldn’t have occurred with the same infected person without the suit.

The issue is that the Dyson device aerosolizes exhaled breath, including virus particles, immediately, and at much higher pressure than HVAC.

As for the inflatable costumes incident there was contact tracing in effect in California when this happened. This was in a Californian hospital and no other incident like this happened before. This was due to the aerosolizing of the costume wearer’s COVID-19 infected breath.

This comment should NOT be downvoted. We are not comparing this device to somebody wearing a mask. We're comparing two mask-less people - one with, one without this device. In which case the quantity of virus expelled in their breath is equal, but the distribution of air is different. How this affects spread of disease is far from obvious.

It could spread more:

- it reaches more people

- it reaches people faster

It could spread less:

- much more diluted

- will dry droplets faster

- it works as a portable filter which filters part of the volume of air in that space

The blade dryers also make an excellent place to capture palm prints. People slowly push their clean hands spread wide in and out. I'd recommend against using such a device at a hacker conference...

Came here for this :-) Naomi is really not happy LOL.

A lot of negativity here but I guess the target market is locations where the air pollution is bad enough that the benefits of escaping it outweigh looking like an extra from a sci-fi B-movie. I remember hearing on the radio in London how air pollution was going to be very bad one day approaching 10 on some scale. A scientist was being interviewed and was asked "Where would the pollution in Beijing be on this scale?", he replied "About 300"

I'm not sure how this is more compelling to use when Beijing is already comfortable with using masks, and we all suddenly have a giant pile sitting at home that aren't going to get a lot of use.

If I live in Beijing I’d probably wear a mask _with_ this thing on.

I remember similar negativity in the western press when tesla unveiled their 'biohazard mode'.

Any day there AQI is below 100 in any of the Indian metros is a good day.

Agree 100%.

Visited most cities in India (Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore) and the pollution is atrocious. I wanted to return back but had to stay on due to a business trip. I can't imagine why/how anyone would want to live in any of the big cities in India. Love the country though.

There is a strong within our executive team to offshore to Latin American countries.

I legitimately can’t tell if this is a joke or not. It must be a joke, and yet it seems legit.

So close to April 1

The function combination is too dystopian. The more I think about it, the more bizarre "luxury headphones with noise cancellation and air purification" seems.

This _has_ to be an early Apr 1.

Please be an early Apr fool's ...

Has it really gotten this bad? If so I hope this is a wake up call, we don't want to live in a Mad Max: fury road reality, right?

Maybe. Same time last year they launched the Detect (cordless vacuum with a laser) and I thought it was an April Fools.

I think timing product launches to cause such speculation may be a deliberate tactic.

There is certainly a resemblance [1].

[1] https://www.therpf.com/forums/attachments/107e65287a72a2732d...

Weird as they are, I need a pair! I currently use a face shield respirator helmet when the forest fire smoke gets bad and I still want to be outside working in the garden, so this would be more convenient!

Same here. I already have noise-cancelling headphones and live in an area where the smog levels are at times hazardous (100ug/m3+).

Bold design.

Reminds me of Scorpion and, "get over here" from Mortal Kombat - https://www.deviantart.com/bakerrrr/art/Scorpion-GET-OVER-HE...

I think I prefer the Scorpion design to this

Considering how much backlash there is around valved respirators, a purification system that blasts aerosolized droplets of spit out into the air seems like an obvious failure

I think the target market is less “COVID” and more “Beijing air pollution”.

Or smoke season sort of anywhere downwind from the west coast of North America.

Respirator masks work much better though and are cheap. I put on my woodworking N99 respirator and it works perfectly for wildfire smoke. This is about the size of a Covid N95 mask

100%, and even aside from cost I personally don't want another thing with batteries to manage. Elastomeric respirators can be even more comfortable with a better seal, and cheaper over repeated wear. Probably what I'll do if I need to be outdoors in heavy smoke again this year.

> Respirator masks work much better

I haven’t observed this to be true; I generally find them to be very uncomfortable. Do you have a brand recommendation?

I also have a pretty big beard which makes them less effective.

3m aura

No it’s not. China especially is extremely wary of COVID spread more than anything, this product is never going to fly in that market.

It's genius - buy our product so you can protect yourself from everyone else wearing our product.

The Guardian's coverage uses a very odd photo of a prototype: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/30/dyson-lau... , seems like an unsubtle "fuck this bullshit" from the photo editor there.

I seriously had to check the date, it looked like an early April fools' day post.

Not April 1st yet...

My thoughts exactly! But from watching the video it seems real, they've actually built at least one of these...

As soon as I saw the video, I thought they were a few days early.

How sad that we live in a world in which this is a product for which a corporation believes there will be a need.

Is this an early April fools joke?

They are definitely not what we are use to when we hear the word headphone but I think they have a specific usecase and market they can address.

I think they are good for anyone doing woodworking, gardening (have pollens), labs where they are chemicals, and similar outdoor work environment.

The problem can be the cost. Dyson are not cheap so and they market that can use is not going to spend that much money.

but the concept is neat. Pushing a boundary

They’d be perfect for mowing the lawn, and I wouldn’t mind having a pair when flying either.

This is actually the first use case that I can take seriously.

I'm not optimistic for the lab or workshop use case. The filters in the ears likely don't filter VOCs and in a woodshop you'd be replacing the (likely costly) filters very frequently due to the size and volume of the particulate.

> labs where they are chemicals

I strongly suspect these don't meet OSHA requirements as a respirator.

Dyson? That's that company that took a Japanese bladeless fan invention from 1981 and called it their own.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6377644/Dyson-fa...

Air pollution ruined my health and my life as a consequence. Although I don’t see this as the solution (electric cars and normalizing remote work are so much more important), I applaud every company that acknowledges the severity of the problem.

This would be perfect for a noise isolating microphone. Many popular high quality headphones simply have a microphone near the ear. That makes it hard to hear the speaker in a noisy area. There are solutions, such as what tank drivers and pilots use. however, that involves an external microphone which "doesn't look good". But these headphones don't look good anyways, and has something near the mouth. So, they might as well add a good noise isolating microphone.

BTW, if any HNers know of any existing headphones with good noise isolating microphones, please let me know.

Reminiscent of the extremely cool ‘wearable tech’ art of Ikeuchi Hiroto: https://www.instagram.com/_ikeuchi/

Just need some AR glasses to completely seal yourself off from your surroundings.

Can’t wait.

Even if this is an April fool's I wouldn't give them a penny of my cash.

Not after their Brexit shenanigans and all that crap over the ventilators.

Can you refresh me?

Too close to April 1st for me to know if this is real or not. I can see benefits but it also seems so strange it's hard to tell.

Reminds me of Hushme: https://www.engadget.com/2017-01-07-hushme.html

I can't believe they're still in business: https://gethushme.com/hushme/

Makes Will.i.am's Xupermask look absolutely practical and well thought out!

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/wi...

From the design video, it looks like it forces air in through the ear cones and then expels your exhalation forward with fans. Wouldn't this turn your face into an even more powerful droplet cannon?

I think the target market is less “COVID” and more “Beijing air pollution”.

When reality has become so weird that half of HN can't detect an (albeit early) April fools' joke... Anyway, good job Dyson!

Edit: Apparently this is real?! https://nypost.com/2022/03/30/dyson-debuts-zone-headphones-w...

Joke's on me. Reality is weird.

This could be used as cooling in VR headsets. Maybe this is Dyson's ends goal?

The day I start seeing these in my city I'll know it is time to move

This looks absolutely brilliant. A mobile air purifier that doesn’t touch your face.

Wow.

Next model will have ozone generator built in, I presume.

Only place I ever expect to see this is on an airplane.

nobody cared who i was until i put on the mask.

April fools joke

This is 100% April Fools, right?

Right ?

Fake news day is two days away.

:facepalm:

Early April 1 prank?

april fools ? it's only two days away

Two days early!

What the...

My first thought is about how headphones have become a tacit treatment for agoraphobia. And agoraphobia is also highly correlated with hypochondria. So if you are willing to pay $500 for noise cancelling headphones that help separate yourself from those around you, I suppose there might be a market for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com