Motivation through music and immersive competition
The Pacemaker headphone taps into new market segments for Oakley. It tackles the issue that, inherently people are leading an increasingly busy lifestyles. Social life and healthy living takes a back seat in the pursuit of careers. The struggle of trying to maintain the perfect work-life balance is real and slowly becoming a myth. Pacemaker is designed to bring the 'life' back into lives by introducing healthy competition, socialization and the best motivator of all, music.
Run to your rhythm
Pacemaker is designed to be an untethered headphone that streams music wirelessly from the user's service of choice. It has a built in voice assistant that doubles up as a fitness trainer and provides audio cues and assistance when required. The headphone also helps you connect to your fitness network and sets up audio based virtual competitions for you to gamefy your fitness regime.
Desirability
For urban runners, eliminating the need to carry anything to listen to the tunes is a great proposition, for a truly wireless experience.
The workout AI beat-syncs to your rhythm to provide the right motivation at the right time.
Viability
With 80% of the music consumption happening through streaming services, and the wireless LTE hardware means you can take your custom playlists on your runs, and opens up partnership opportunities with streamers.
Feasability
With SIM on chip technologies and high speed LTE the time for a dedicated, untethered fitness headphone is today
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Know your surrounding, run free but run safe
The headphones have been designed with a dual sound projection system. The drivers are designed to function as a spacial audio unit or as an in-ear unit. Spacial sound is ideal when there is a need for spacial awareness for the user. Maintaining balance while doing intense physical activity is critical, so the Spacial sound drivers allows the inner-ear to work to maintain the balance of the body, while listening to the music.
Pair and forget
The headphone has been designed with the idea of 'pair and forget', where you have to pair it to your smartphone only once during setup, where it receives all your preferred setting and playlist information. Once paired the phone acts as a screen for the headphone where it stored all your run analytics, your navigational data, and your social networking activities.
Music is the universal motivator used by athletes, music provided additional focus, stamina, and the will to push on. Athletes listen to music while prepping for a fitness session, while competing, and in different environmental conditions.
One of the biggest issues faced by the current generation of 'wireless headphones' is that all of them need a secondary device to process, store or stream music, meaning the user has to carry their smartphone or music player with them defeating purpose of a wireless headphone fitness headphone. A truly wireless untethered headphone geared towards fitness is still unavailable.
Every individual who has pursued fitness understands the phenomenon of 'plateau'. Plateau is a phase the body enters while following a fitness regime where the body adapts to the regime and gaining results is paused or difficult to get. A fitness trainer is able to predict these and switch it up for the user. In an urban setting getting a fitness trainer is impractical and expensive.
Context
The rise of urban living combined with increasing number of people migrating to major urban areas means that a lot of these people have really busy lifestyles with limited or no time to socialize, or maintain a fitness regime.Increasingly it is seen that the urban human either hits the gym or in pursuit of discovery hits the streets as an urban athlete.
Research into the demography place these athletes within an age group of 23-52. Running clubs are becoming a phenomenon in the urban centers around the world, there are healthy competitions, socialization, but not way to develop this organic growth.
run to the rHythm