When people talk about augmented reality, they almost always focus on visual methods of AR. But there’s an entirely different type of ‘augmented reality’ experience: one for your ears. And this is where AirPods have proven so fantastic with their ever-expanding features. Here are all the ways AirPods are the ultimate AR device for your ears.
AirPods features that alter your experience of the world
Augmented reality aims to modify your body’s experience of the world around you, bringing technology to bear in useful ways.
AirPods do that through a variety of powerful features:
- Active Noise Cancellation recognizes sounds in your environment but filters them out of your hearing.
- Transparency mode replicates the experience of hearing as if you don’t have anything plugged in or covering your ears, even though you do.
- Adaptive Audio blends the best of these two features for a more ideal sound experience.
These three modes may be the ones you’re most familiar with. They’re front and center in Apple’s marketing and exposed most prominently throughout iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
But they’re just the start.
- Conversation Awareness dynamically lowers the volume of what’s playing and boosts voices in front of you.
- Voice Isolation, just added in iOS 18, provides a clean, clear phone call experience even in noisy environments.
With AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Max, and now AirPods 4, Apple has been ‘augmenting reality’ for AirPods users for years.
And all of this foundation has made possible three new hearing health features that are coming soon exclusively for AirPods Pro 2 users.
- Hearing Protection will offer an important safeguard for users who are in dangerously loud environments.
- Media Assist will offer a custom hearing profile that’s tailored to your ears based on the Apple-offered Hearing Test feature.
- Finally, Hearing Aid support will empower users to hear the world better, augmenting whatever hearing difficulties they may have.
Apple doesn’t market AirPods as AR devices, but all of the above features very much show how they could. It would just mean repositioning AR as applying not just to our eyes, but also our ears.
Wrap-up: More than wireless earbuds
When AirPods first launched, they impressed for being one of the best examples of a truly wireless pair of earbuds.
Today, every AirPods product does so much more than play audio from your favorite devices. They change your experience of the world around you in a positive way: boosting or muting media, voices, loud noises, and more to suit the needs of any given situation.
Apple’s Vision Pro, Meta’s Orion project, and the like may come to mind when we think of AR. But AR for hearing has been around for years, and it keeps getting better.
