It's primarily for safety, like walking outside so you're aware of your surroundings. As for critical listening, an open soundstage is more accurate to the original sound than closed headphones.
People keep saying that, but wearing earphones while walking outside is a niche usage. It's mostly an excuse because no one knows how to do total noise cancellation. Being able to work in quiet while others are yammering around you is priceless.
As a person, no. Most people maybe. It's incredibly liberating to not feel like you are missing out on the world around you sometimes (and safer). Sure sometimes I want to duck out and place my big puffy over ear speakers on and block everything out, but for day to day use for navigation, podcasts, phone conversations, AI interactions, and some stereo background music - this is exactly what this person wants.
I work delivering food on a bicycle. I need to be able to hear things. Would be nice if I could listing to my playlists and not drown out the car coming my way.
Not affiliated, just like mine for when I need to keep my ears completely open. Audio quality is surprisingly good, but also never going to compete with something whose sole purpose is to sound good i.e. non-sporty headphones.
Bike riding is perfect for these bone conducting headphones, you can listen to tunes while hearing absolutely everything.
The bose quietcomfort ones do that and more. You can choose if you want to block out external sounds with ANC or enable pass-through so you can hear the world around you. Not sure why they needed to make this product.
I use the shockz (another open ear headset) daily with my job. Work on equipment, a lot of tedious opening up a machine and fixing it. I don't have a singular place but move around a lot. Going from earbuds that I have to take out just to have a conversation if someone comes up and asks questions vs the open ear allows me to be able to know what's happening around me, keeps from annoying those around me with whatever I'm listening to, and I've chewed through so many audiobooks which has kept me from losing my mind.
Additional anecdote from me, but I specifically seek out good sound pass-thru over good noise cancelling because I use music to help focus but need to hear at the same time like, say, at work when a call comes in.
I don't need it to be particularly loud, either, as I also have audio processing disorder so some concerns I see in this thread such as (paraphrasing) "probably poor bass" isn't as much of a concern.
I currently use Sony's Latest LinkBud S earbuds, and I'm pretty happy with it. But if I were still looking for a pair, something like what's being offered here is exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to me.
These will undoubtedly appeal to a niche audience vs mass appeal, but so long as production doesn't outpace demand I could see such a line of ear buds becoming quite popular among those who want that feature specifically.
(Edit: oops, my instance got all weird and posted 4 times. Fixed.)
The amount of people in the comments not understanding why open buds are relevant to some people / the concept of earbuds overall is quite funny. I guess there's some truth in stereotypical Lemmy user rarely showing up outside 🙃
Do we know they're bone conducting? or is this like the head phones on the Valve Index, highly directional and focused speakers which only project sound in a very narrow band spaciously?
These actually look like something I could see people wearing all day. Other wireless earbuds make you look like a dork, but these actually look pretty stylish IMO
You haven't even heard them and are making grand assumptions. The bass is great at low to medium listening levels but rolls off as you increase the volume due to physical limitations.
Norm from Tested recently reviewed the "Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses". The most interesting use case for him was to have good, non obtrusive earphones that allow you to hear normally without blocking people out.