Augmented reality comes to the ears, too

Sharing your headphones with someone, in every important aspect, it’s gross. There has to be a strong reason to want to peel another person coarse wax in your external auditory canal. For example, an unbearable long flight without love or other options (both are not mutually exclusive). Or one that requires a shared experience, somehow two or more people listening to the same audio track at the same time.

Entrepreneur Jonathan Wegener believes it was the culmination of events that prompted him to build a new app that needs sharing AirPods. In the early 2010s, when it was the Wegener Building memory application TimeHopImprov Everywhere’s Mp3 Experiments was also gaining momentum in New York, a “participatory audio experience,” providing coordinated movement guidelines to thousands of people wearing headphones. Mp3 The experiment seemed “incredibly moving,” private and communal: a voice whispering in your ear, a feeling of friendship with strangers as you participate in the same public performance.

Then, a few years later, Apple’s AirPods came out, and Wegener, like millions of others, was amazed at the wireless audio effort they offered. He saw two Greek friends, a couple, handing out a pair of AirPods so they could listen to music together.

So he started building the next thing: PairPlay, even if it’s Apple’s clear “AirPlay” game. It is an iOS application that guides couples, friends or children through scenarios imagined in their own homes. It’s part of the growing trend, as audio-based entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the perfect storm of technology — from increasingly sophisticated processors to personal devices that can deliver incredibly good sound to sensors that track people’s movements.

In PairPlay, a voice is streamed Andy Puddicombe–level of calm tells people to deal with their pair of AirPods, and then gives them two different versions of a stage, each headset. There are several sections, similar to scenes rather than downloadable podcasts. In one episode, one of the participants becomes a robot. In another series of episodes, they both become secret agents. Another simulates a zombie apocalypse, asking players to run around the house, closing the windows and finding hiding places without knowing that the other person is “infected”. (It is a little close at the time of Covid).

I tested the beta version of PairPay with a WIRED colleague, and then asked him and his partner, who had just moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, to test it together. (Welcome to Silicon Valley! Try this app now.) It was almost as fun to watch other people participate as I was testing the app myself. They confronted each other, closed their eyes, opened it again. Then they tore up the place, took pillows and placed them in different rooms, awkwardly laughing, trying to get what I thought was dancing. After a few minutes the AirPods were removed. A friend of mine admitted that he was funny, but his partner thought he didn’t have a fully narrated narrative. It seemed silly to me to use the app, he said, even though he admitted that was the point.

PairPlay is a free download and all content is free. For now. It’s easy to see how a company can offer subscriber content along the line. (It’s less “free” if you don’t have an iPhone and AirPods because you need two items to use the app.) It’s only available in English, and unfortunately for people with hearing impairments, there aren’t really any accessibility features included in the app, such as captions.