Music sharing has increasingly become a way to make new friends and stay in touch but headphones on the market today are generally designed for people to listen to music in isolation. This gives room for innovative headphones like the Wearhaus Arc to disrupt the headphone landscape. What make them stand out are two key features: sharing music in sync via a Bluetooth network and expressing music through colors.
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It seemed an easy path to continue with the safety net of a Berkeley engineering degree, however dropouts Richie Zeng and Nelson Zhang thought it best to invest their time and energy focusing on their passion for music and developing hardware products. Their shared craze for music paved the way for designing the Wearhaus Arc, sleek wireless headphones that reinvent social music listening.
The Arc is all about you. Your style, your personality, and the music you love. Primarily in white or black, you can customize the light ring of the headphones from the app, and let your true colors shine!
Using the Wearhaus app (iOS or Android), you can see what people around you are listening to, join them in real time, or broadcast your own playlist. As seen in the video, this can help forge new friendships and discover shared interests!
Wearhaus Arc uses Bluetooth technology to seamlessly sync multiple users’ headphones, but the team wants Arc to be the best Bluetooth headphones on the market, regardless whether they want to use the syncing functionality or not. Richie says that they’ve been working to ensure that the headphones have top-notch sound quality, and will continue collaborating with their manufacturer over the summer to develop a durable, lightweight, and comfortable product.
- Each earcup features an iconic, ring-shaped backlight that can be set to any color via the mobile app.
- When other people tune in to your music, their lights pulse with the same color – a visual cue to tell who’s listening with you.
- A capacitive touch panel allows you to easily control volume, playback, and sharing with simple gestures.
As Nelson puts it, originally, headphones were just tools for channeling audio and now they have becoming more and more about good design and self-expression. With Arc, the team wanted to take that creative, personal aspect to the next level.
The first batch of Wearhaus Arcs is expected to ship by this holiday season. It is available for a special backer’s price of $150 that is on offer until early June, but pre-orders will remain open afterwards at the full $200 retail value. You can get yours here.
What we love about the creative duo is that they have taken the initiative to Crowdfund their project on their own platform. No external host! They considered it a priority to to control the design of their site to tell their brand story in the most effective way.
Designers: Nelson Zhang and Richie Zeng [ Preorder Here ]
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