HUMAN BLINKERS?

Panasonic‘s design studio Future Life Factory is developing wearable blinkers to limit your sense of sound and sight, and help you focus on what’s directly in front of you. Wear Space is the first prototype, it’s designed to keep people distraction-free when working in busy spaces or open-plan offices by blocking them off from their immediate surroundings.

Created in collaboration with Japanese fashion designer Kunihiko Morinaga, the device consists of a curved strip of flexible material that wraps around the back of the user’s head, and extends out to shield the sides of their eyes. The user’s viewing angle can be adjusted by pulling or pushing the two ends of the device, to narrow or widen the visibility, depending on the desired level of concentration. The partition is fixed around the wearer’s head by a pair of noise-cancelling headphones fitted to the inside of the curved body. These are used to block out ambient sounds, and feature three levels of noise cancellation depending on the environment. With wireless and bluetooth, the device can be connected to a smartphone or PC to listen to a chosen sound or music.

Maybe there’s nothing dystopian about Wear Space, one well-known magazine subtly suggested it with the article titled “There’s nothing dystopian at all about these high-tech blinkers for humans.” but still this product has a similar aesthetic and concept to horse blinkers. We hope that, with time, Panasonic will unveil a new and less animalesque prototype. A working model of the wearable device was debuted at Panasonic’s South by Southwest (SXSW) event earlier in March this year. Still in the prototype phase, the design studio have an ongoing crowdfunding campaign running until 11 December 2018 to rally up support for the product.

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