glasses for the ears? This is how the “Fauna” makes your everyday office life easier

Fauna

It will probably be a while before virtual or augmented reality glasses look like normal glasses. But audio glasses come very close to this goal. The startup Fauna from Austria designed its glasses so that they look exactly like this: like distinctive glasses. We liked that. But basically nobody wears a fauna just because of its design. The test shows that there are much more compelling reasons for this. Audio glasses are primarily worn to hear sounds. That’s exactly why the fauna has installed a lot of technology in its temples. On each side there is a two-way sound system with tiny speakers aimed at the user’s ear. There are also small batteries and two microphones. The front area of ​​the temples is touch-sensitive, functions can be controlled here by tapping or swiping. There is no memory in the glasses. Sounds come to the fauna wirelessly via Bluetooth. To do this, it must first be connected to a smartphone or a computer. The manufacturer has made this as easy as possible. If the fauna is taken out of its case, it already begins the so-called pairing.

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Now the user has to go into the Bluetooth settings on their auxiliary device – we have tested this with smartphones and notebooks – and confirm the connection with the glasses. Next time, Fauna will automatically connect to the device it was last connected to. You shouldn’t set your expectations too high when it comes to the sound quality. We would describe the sound as mediocre to flat at best. But you do the glasses an injustice if you compare them to real earphones that sit in or just in front of the ear canal. Since the sounds come from the speakers in the bracket, the bass in particular is extremely weak here. That’s okay for background music, but nothing more. The fauna is not a hi-fi device.

Glasses are good for listening to podcasts and audio books

Once you get the hang of it, it gets interesting. The fauna is always sufficient for listening to podcasts or audio books. In addition, you also hear all the surrounding noises, which is safer than isolating with real earphones or headphones, especially in traffic. On a busy road, however, the traffic noise can be louder than the fauna, so you can’t hear much from their mini-speakers. In the office, on the other hand, you can listen to podcasts or music with the fauna without signaling to everyone else that you are not available. However, if the environment is very quiet, people can still see which piece of music is being played from a distance of two meters when the maximum volume is set. At half volume, only a barely audible whisper can be heard from this distance. We therefore consider the computer workstation to be the optimal scenario for the fauna, as videos can be played here without colleagues having to overhear the sound. The glasses are also ideal for making phone calls, provided it is not too windy. In the test, the conversation partners mostly understood us very well. If this was not the case, it was due to the Bluetooth connection. A new connection corrected that. Since the fauna has no buttons, it can only be controlled via the touch-sensitive bracket surfaces.

Four hours of battery life are included

For example, double-tapping on the left side answers or ends a call. This way, when music is playing, the current song will be paused and continue playing. A double tap on the right side calls up the digital language assistant on the smartphone. If you hold your finger on the left side of the bracket for four seconds, the music skips a song, and on the right side it starts a new Bluetooth pairing. And swiping forwards or backwards on the left temple varies the volume.

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