Panasonic’s high-tech blinders give you a ‘psychological’ work space [Sticky or Not]

We’ve all had those moments when you’re doing work for school or your job and just need to tune everything out to get focused. That can be hard, though, especially at a busy workplace or campus setting filled with all kinds of distractions.

With Panasonic’s high-tech ‘Wear Space’ blinders concept, that might not be a problem for much longer.

The Wear Space, which is currently being crowdfunded by the Japanese electronics company’s Future of Life division, aims to offer you a “personal psychological space” for maximum productivity.

Specifically, Future of Life has taken a pair of noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones and covered it in a lightweight fabric that blocks your horizontal field of view by about 60 percent. According to Future of Life, the headphones have a battery life of 20 hours and charge over USB.

The team also says it’s working with “external partners” to develop applications for the Wear Space, although it’s currently unclear what exactly those may be.

Panasonic is currently raising money for the Wear Space on Japanese crowdfunding site GreenFunding. The company aims to raise ¥15 million (around $133,000 USD, or about $174,292 CAD) for the Wear Space through crowdfunding, with pricing for each unit set for around $250 USD (about $327 CAD).

Verdict: Sticky

While the Wear Space might be too isolating or just plain weird for some, it’s always nice to have options. To be sure, because it’s currently just a crowdfunded concept, it remains to be seen just how successful the end product will be. Nearly $330 CAD is pretty steep (assuming this gets sold in Canada) and we don’t know how high-quality the audio of the headphones will be.

Given that a tech giant like Panasonic is behind it, though, there’s at least more reason to be optimistic about how well it will turn out than, say, a random startup. So far, the Wear Space has been awarded the 2017 Red Dot Award for Best of the Best international design, so it’s already resonating with industry experts.

I can also see it being very useful for quite a few every day workers, especially for someone like me who often needs a quieter environment to work in. Let’s just hope people don’t go overboard in using it and we all become a dystopia.

Note: This post is part of an ongoing series titled Sticky or Not in which staff reporter Bradly Shankar analyzes new and often bizarre gadgets, rating them sticky (good) or not (bad).