From the company that brought you fancy vacuum cleaners and bladeless fans, comes a world’s first – headphones with an attached air purifier, something that most people would never have thought they’ll need. The Dyson Zone is Dyson’s first attempt at wearable technology, and like many of its products, it looks fantastically futuristic. It will launch in Fall 2022.
The Dyson Zone was a product six years in the making, with over 500 prototypes tested. It solves, or rather filters out, two of humanity’s big problems – air and sound pollution.
Combining its 30-year knowledge in air flow and filtration with Dyson’s own new scientific approach to acoustics and noise cancelling, the Dyson Zone delivers you your own pocket of filtered air and cancels out ambient noise in one neat package.
“The Dyson Zone purifies the air you breathe on the move. And unlike face masks, it delivers a plume of fresh air without touching your face, using high-performance filters and two miniaturised air pumps,” Dyson Zone’s chief engineer Jake Dyson says.
Its miniaturised compressors are housed in the earcups, which draws air through its dual-layer electrostatic-carbon filters to remove allergens and pollutants, before blowing it to your nose and mouth through the Zone’s contact-free mouth visor. Dyson is confident it will work well outdoors, including when wind is blowing at you.
That said, the Dyson Zone is not certified to protect against Covid, meaning that in situations where you’ll need an N95 or FFP2 mask, just the visor alone will not be sufficient. But Dyson has a solution for that (more below).
Dyson Zone has four air purification modes: low, medium, high and Auto, meant for different levels of exertion. In Auto, it uses accelerometers to detect your speed and is smart enough to decide when you are running or climbing the stairs, which of the low, medium or high modes to toggle automatically.
For its headphones, it features the expected active noise cancellation (ANC) prominent in many of today’s best audio wear. It has 3 ANC modes: isolation, the highest level of noise filtering; conversation, which activates when you dip the visor that automatically turns off purification; and transparency, which amplifies ambient sound to let you be aware of your surroundings.
Overall, you can wear the Dyson Zone in a few ways. You can ditch the visor and wear it like a normal pair of headphones. Or you can wear it as it is meant to be worn, with visor and ANC on for the best protection against the scourge of dust and noise. In places where you’ll need to mask up against COVID-19, both a regular face mask and an FFP2 mask are provided with the box, which fits with the Dyson Zone to provide a sealed environment.
The Dyson Zone has been product tested in many environments, including in Malaysia by its Malaysia Development Centre team. It is promised to be robust and durable enough even in hot and humid regions of Southeast Asia like Singapore.
Other specifications for the Dyson Zone such as its weight or retail price has not been released yet. Dyson Zone is expected to be made available online and at Dyson Demo Stores in Fall 2022. And with it, our march into a dystopian cyberpunk future begins (perhaps).
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