Has anyone ever seen anything like this? I can’t imagine this hasn’t been attempted
Seems difficult to implement. Sound traveling through the soft tissue of the ears instead of directly into the ear canal, or pressing directly against your head for bone conducting.
It may be possible, but it seems like it would leak sound a lot more than other types of options.Just slap a suction cup on one end so it sticks to the side of the user’s skull 👍
This sounds like a job for 3d printing.
Also, can you say more about your idea? Are they just speakers in the ear lobe? Ear buds held in place by something that goes through the lobe? Something else?
I mean I have a 3d printer I could prototype but generally 3d prints aren’t an end all solution as their porous surfaces are a breeding ground for bacteria. And after some testing I could think of maybe two ways to accomplish this, one with a speaker behind a half circle that fits in like a plug. The downside of this design is you would constantly have to rotate the open portion of the semicircle to be directed towards your ear canal. The other idea is an assembly that fits in as a plug and uses a probe that rests against an area behind your ear to do bone conduction rather than straight audio. This is generally meant to be a stealth or at the least pretty discreet listening system
Well, I don’t really have any ideas for implementing the actual headphone portion. But as for the porous nature of 3d prints, I offer 2 separate solutions with wildly different cost points:
- Get/use a resin printer.
- Use a filler on the surface of your filament print like bondo, and then finish it with a coating of some kind, possibly epoxy.
A common one is to 3d print a mold for pouring a different material
Three options, two with a similar cost point and one with a different one!
I think he’s thinking like conduction headphones. Some of them are pretty decent.
But without the pressure against your head they lose effectiveness real fast.
There was a bone-conduction rig, years-ago, that went through one’s collarbones, instead of one’s skull…
it sorta draped small-scarf-like around one’s neck, & over one’s shoulders, iirc…
Bose recently released a clip-on type of earbuds. Maybe someone can find a way to customize them for gauged ears.
https://www.bose.com/p/earbuds/bose-ultra-open-earbuds/ULT-HEADPHONEOPN.html
Hard enough keeping ear buds clean, right?
