“Fluorine, Uranium, Carbon and Potassium are my favourite elements.  Starting with Fluorine, it’s such a busy element.  It’s a gas and one of the most reactive elements in the periodic table, reacting with every other element except the lighter noble gases.  When combined with Hydrogen, you get hydrofluoric acid, which is one of the few acids which can eat its way through a glass bottle.  That’s so cool it could have come out of Harry Potter.

Next comes Uranium, moving from one of the lightest elements to one of the heaviest.  A tennis ball sized lump of uranium would weigh around 3 kg, as it’s 60% heavier than lead.  Unlike lead, it’s a lot more interesting, as it’s radioactive, which means you can use it for nuclear reactors.  However, for that to work. You need to enrich the uranium, as the stuff you dig up only contains around 0.8% of the fissionable isotope U-238.  To enrich it you need to react it with my first favourite – Fluorine, to make the gas Uranium Hexafluoride, then use centrifuges to separate the slightly heavier isotopes, before converting it back to the enriched metal.  (Note to kids – this is not something to attempt at home.)

Then we have Carbon.   Without it, we wouldn’t be here.  Its ability to make complex molecules is the basis of life as we know it.  If we didn’t have Carbon we wouldn’t have vegetables, meat, the charcoal to cook them, or us to eat them.  So, three cheers for Carbon.

Finally, who doesn’t love Potassium?  If you ever had a klutzy chemistry teacher who accidentally dopped a chunk of potassium into a sink full of water, scarring the ceiling of the lab for generations to come, you’d have taken it to heart.  Not least for its refusal to conform, spurning “P” as it chemical symbol.  Potassium was discovered sixty two years before the usurping Phosphorus by an eminent British scientist, but his German rival Ludwig Gilbert renamed it Kalium a few years later, letting Phosphorous’s fans steal the capital letter and confusing multiple generations of school children.”

That’s the story I tell.  Although everything in it is true, it’s also a total lie.  It’s not why I bought the T-shirt.  I bought it because of what it spells.  The first three chemical symbols are obvious – F, U and C.  Every child who is taught chemistry should know that the symbol for Potassium is K.  Hence the joke.  But hardly anyone ever gets it.  And because of that, nobody is offended by it.

Every so often, I’m delighted when someone recognises it, but they’re few and far between.  A neighbour turned round from painting his front windows and complimented my “sweary” T-shirt.  A waitress serving at a pavement café looked up, laughed and asked where I got it from.  And a stand-up comic at the Edinburgh Fringe saw it and thought was better than any of his jokes, before explaining that he had a chemistry degree.  But although I’ve worn it around the world, almost nobody notices it. 

I do find the fact that nobody is offended quite offensive.  The sad conclusion is that science teaching is failing all around the world.  Either that, or we have so little interest in teaching creativity and serendipity that nobody joins the dots between the chemical symbols and the word they produce.  Which are both totally depressing observations.  But I will continue wearing it.  There’s a great joy in meeting the few who do get it, which makes it all worthwhile.  There’s also comfort in knowing that those I explain it to will never forget that the chemical symbol for Potassium is “K”, which means I’m doing a much better job than their chemistry teacher did.  But it doesn’t augur well for the coming generations of STEM students.

Incidentally, you can’t make STEM out of chemical element names.  S would give you smelly Sulphur.  Alternatively, you could start with St, which is canny Tin.  But after that, there is no E, EM or M.  Which could be why STEM is such a failed acronym.

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Nobody in the industry saw where things would go.  Or go wrong.  What was a novelty has changed people’s lives.  So far, it has been overwhelmingly consensual.  Individuals have the choice of what they capture and upload.  Most probably don’t fully understand the implications og having their images online, and some abuse it, but there is a fairly well defined contract.  With smart glasses, that is about to change.  To illustrate why, let me ask a simple question.  Do you appear in any online porn videos?

I suspect everyone believes they can answer that question unequivocally.  A few years ago, you could.  Today, you can’t be quite so sure.  To explain why, let’s look at an everyday couple – Taylor and Pat.  They’ve just finished watching the latest series of Rivals and thought it would be fun to place themselves in their favourite sex scenes.  Their AI app is happy to oblige.  They upload the series clips along with links to lots of photos of themselves and enjoy watching the resulting  video. 

Human nature being what it is, a few weeks later they start thinking how it might look if they were taller, blonder, fitter or better endowed and go back to their AI to ask it to update the clips.  This time, the AI is likely to trawl the web for images which meet Pat and Taylor’s requirements, melding them into the bodies it has been asked to update, because that’s easier than transforming the images of Taylor and Pat from scratch.  Nobody will know who the new images are based on or where they came from, but if your image met Pat and Taylor’s requirements, it could be you.

As neither Pat nor Taylor are identifiable as the participants in their latest clips, they don’t feel quite so discreet about them and share them with a few close friends.  Once again, human nature asserts itself – some of their friends share them with their friends and eventually they end up on the net.  The people portrayed will probably never know, unless someone sees the clip and tells them.

We have no idea how much this happens, but we do know that it does.  There is a steady stream of court cases of malicious deepfakes being uncovered, with legislation being proposed to try to control them.  But the everyday use of your image is still largely uncharted.  Once you upload it, it’s essentially fair game for any AI model that is scraping the web for content.  At the corporate level, publishers and film studio are fighting the AI companies in the courts, claiming that training a Large Language Model (LLM) on copyright content is a breach.  In general, the US Government appears to support the AI companies’ approach, which is “just do it” – not least because the Government fears any restraint might jeopardise what they believe is the US’ “global leadership in artificial intelligence”.  Or, to put it another way, your image is deemed collateral fodder for the good of the AI industry and making America great again.

If the service is free, you’re the product

There is an adage in the internet world, which is “If the service is free, you are the product”.  The implication is that if you use a free service, whether that’s email, social media, or any other app, then the service provider can use any data or images you’ve upload to “improve” their business models.  Initially that was metadata that they used to develop new services or sell to advertisers.  As AI has evolved over the last few years it’s needed more and more data to train algorithms.  Almost every company involved in AI development has started trawling the web and social media for everything that is written and every image that has been uploaded.  As almost all of the social media companies are heavily involved with AI, they’ve all been happy to let your data be hoovered up, whether that’s photos, videos or text.  All of the AI applications can then use it largely as they please, without asking you permission.  Which means your online presence may be wider than you think.  And not necessarily where you think it is.

Up until now, you had a choice, albeit a limited one.  If you wanted to keep control of your data or images, so that they weren’t accessible to programs scraping the net, and your image stayed private, you just stopped uploading anything.  It’s essentially security by obscurity.  Some information will always get out as you’re captured in friend’s or work photos, but it’s limited and probably won’t have much metadata tagging it.  It does mean you’ll be living in a world without social media – a choice few would make today.  But it was an option.

The Smart Glasses Contract

The arrival of smart glasses changes the equation.  As soon as someone is looking at you, capturing and uploading your image without your knowledge, you lose the ability to opt out.  A short video will contain enough data to make it moderately easy for an AI to identify you, and anything that is uploaded can be scraped by other AIs and used.  Public privacy will disappear.

There is already a concern about smart glasses being used to capture information which is deemed private.  Many theatres and cinemas are banning smart glasses to stop performances being pirated.  Courts are banning them, not least because of evidence that jurors may be using them not just to record trials, but to request legal advice on the case they’re involved in.  There’s also growing outrage about their use in secretly filming and uploading images of girls and women.  These are all cases of misuse where legislation could help, but they conceal the fact that the previous social contract has changed.  With the usage model promoted by Meta, nobody’s image is exempt.  Their philosophy is that we are all grist to the AI mill, allegedly for the greater good of mankind.

Where the debate gets difficult, is that smart glasses can have enormous benefit.  People with accessibility issues find them invaluable.  But this is where we hit the dilemma. To be useful, the AI driving them needs a large amount of data to understand the world around you.  Limiting the quantity of that data would make them less useful, and they would probably never be economically viable to develop for the people who most need them.  On the other hand, a laissez fair approach to uploading everything with no restrictions (à laMeta) could generate a backlash large enough to kill the market for everyone.

Some manufacturers are very aware of this.  Even, another smart glasses manufacturer, believes that smart glasses don’t need to record, and have just launched a pair without a camera, aiming more at productivity.  It’s a very different concept and illustrates that the market really doesn’t know where it’s going at the moment.  Does the public want glasses that are always-on cameras, or would they be satisfied with head-up displays that responded to their current context?  Whilst companies like Meta may argue they’re the same thing, the privacy approaches that result are diametrically opposite.

The speed of deployment and lack of perception of the issues is a large part of the problem.  It’s led to the widespread feeling that Smart Glasses are predominantly used by “manfluencers”, with the media dubbing them “Pervert Glasses”  For those who remember the outcry against Google Glass, you’ve not seen anything yet.  Meta is not helping the debate.  Business Insider reports that Meta’s platform head, Adam Mosseri, claims the company would ban any user uploading videos showing them harassing others.  But that only tackles their deliberate misuse, and is an after the event sop.  So is their claim that they’ll stop users obscuring the recording light with bits or black tape.  These statements show that they totally fail to understand the unintentional undermining of personal perception.  This isn’t about deliberate harassment – that will always happen and can (in theory) be tacked with legislation.  It’s about chipping away at your ownership of your identity, and moving us to a world where anyone can be deliberately or  accidentally portrayed as something that is not yourself.  What Meta fails to understand is the value of personal identity. 

Rupert Goodwins, writing on The Register, makes a nice analogy, which is to compare smart glasses with dogs.  Few people would trust an XL Bully with their children, but millions trust labradors.  Which is why we try to control XL Bullies.  It’s not difficult to guess who Rupert considers to be he XL Bully.

He’s not alone.  There’s a business aphorism from Mark Zuckerberg which is often quoted by tech startups – “Move fast and break things”.  More and more critics of Meta’s Smart Glasses policy feel that needs to be amended to “Move fast and break people”.  Because people are being broken.  Many have already discovered that their image has been used without their knowledge or consent.  All they did was to upload photos of themselves, which have been trawled by AI models as they were being trained.  Although everyone knew that putting their image in the cloud made it public, few thought through the consequences. 

The subtle and insidious difference that comes with smart glasses is that the option to opt out disappears, as anyone can upload what they see to the web.  In most cases, it’s unlikely to be done maliciously – you’ll just be there as someone records their holiday or asks their AI for directions, but once your image is captured, you’ve lost control of it and given it to any app that wants to use you.  That is new, and is something that needs to be discussed, as once that contract is normalised, there is no return.

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It’s always felt like an opportunity missed.  There’s so much more you can do with it.  With the greater versatility of earbuds using the new Bluetooth LE Audio specifications it can do volume and media control (and a few companies have got around to do that).  With Auracast, it can be used to find and display the available broadcast audio streams around you.  You can put in camera in it to scan QR codes to select music streams.  (Apple filed a rather basic patent on that back in 2019, and there are rumours it might soon see the light of day).  Or you can take advantage of the decent sized battery to add a cellular modem and SIM to provide a local access point for audio and data.  So, I was really pleased to see Plaud do exactly that with their new Plaud One.  They’ve put an AI agent into the battery box to let you make sense of conversations and summarise your day.

The Plaud One is by no means the first personal AI hardware offering.  We’ve had Humane’s Pin, the Rabbit R1 and a host of others, all of which have quickly disappeared,  They looked slick in their promotional videos, but failed to work as well as promised in real life.  We don’t know whether the Plaud One will suffer the same fate, but what is interesting is that it comes from a rather different background.  Plaud have been developing AI for note-taking, concentrating on capturing voice and turning that into notes and actions.  They’re not alone, but they’ve developed a nice balance between phone app and hardware.  They claim over 2.5 million professional users and have used those to develop vertical applications which appear to work,

What I like about the approach is the way that it moves phone and laptop out of the workflow for most of the time.  The phone app is still there when you need it, but it seems that you’re likely to use the phone a lot less.  Like many other attempts to wean us away from our phone fixation, the Plaud One uses audio to whisper in our ear, answering questions, finding information and performing actions.  What feels different (and I’m yet to play with a Plaud) is that it appears to do a good job of integrating with phone or PC when it needs to.  Unlike other AI pins, or smart glasses, it doesn’t try to do everything itself. It feels like one of the most interesting steps we’ve seen recently, on the principle of don’t do too much, but do it well.  Although many believe that the smartphone form factor will live forever, I doubt it.  I suspect that we’re not far from discovering what will come next.  We will almost certainly see a number of small steps before that answer emerges, and the Plaud One looks as if it could be the first of those to gain traction.  I’m looking forward to seeing how it works.

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A lot has changed.  After the interruption of Covid, the Edinburgh Deaf Festival https://www.creativescotland.com/news-stories/latest-news/archive/2026/07/fifth-edinburgh-deaf-festival—bigger-brighter-bolder-than-ever came into existence.  Celebrating deaf culture, language and heritage, it runs as an integral part of the Fringe.  This was its fifth year, where it had grown to 80 events.  Equally importantly, a recognition of hearing loss has become more obvious in the mainstream.  In the first week of the Fringe, Dundee Rep’s excellent show “The Singer” won a well-deserved Fringe First Award.  It was an object lesson in how to put BSL, captioning and deaf experience together on stage for every audience member.  It was a brilliant example of how to do it properly and tell an important story in a way that everyone could appreciate.

Having attended the Fringe for around 40 years, Fringe audiences seem to be ageing, which makes support for hearing loss more important.  I’m not sure whether there are any official figures on the audience demographic, but in many shows we attended, it felt that we were amongst the youngest audience members.  A number of comedians made references to taking their audience with them, with their material reflecting the challenges of retirement, not least having to care for parents who are in their nineties.  Mark Thomas illustrated the issue well when one of his hearing aids slipped out of an overly sweaty ear in the rather warm, subterranean Stand Comedy Club.  I noticed an increasing number of performers wearing hearing aids, as well as many in the audience.  Which is good, but highlights a problem for venues.

According to the RNID  https://rnid.org.uk/what-we-do/data-and-evidence/deafness-and-hearing-loss-prevalence/, around 2.4 million people in the UK have a level of hearing loss that means they would struggle to hear most conversational speech.  900,000 of those are classified as severely or profoundly deaf.  That latter category needs help in hearing what’s on stage, but the wider 2.4 million would benefit as well.  BSL is great for the 85,000 who use it as their main means of communication, but theatres need to look at ways of providing hearing assistance for everyone. 

Captioning is an obvious option, but most of what we saw was difficult to read, so audiences following the captions missed much of what was happening on stage.  I had hoped to find a few venues which might be trying out Auracast – the new Bluetooth technology which works with both hearing aids and recent earbuds.  I had high hopes for the Traverse, as they had put out a press release in June about their new Auracast system, alongside details of some of the  Fringe shows (https://aurahear.com/2026/06/were-excited-auracast-comes-to-edinburghs-traverse-theatre/.  Sadly, on the five occasion we saw plays there, I found no sign of any Auracast transmission.  There was no signage suggesting it was working (nor was there any for their telecoil system) and none of the front of house staff knew anything about it.  I understand the excitement of getting press releases out, but for accessibility issues, they do need to reflect reality, and the theatre staff need to be trained to support anyone requiring help.

The Traverse also exhibited some unwelcome aspects of sound design, which didn’t enhance hearing for anyone.  In their headline show “After Party” the actors were miked, which led to some very strange effects.  At one point two characters were talking together at the front left of stage.  One voice came from a speaker close to them; the other from a speaker at the top right of stage, inserting a good 10 metre separation into what should have been an intimate conversation.  There were equally bizarre effects throughout “Badgers” in the smaller Traverse 2 studio space, where the sound source jumped back and forth between the actress and speakers.  I got the feeling that directors and sound designers are being blinded by technology and not listening to what the audience is hearing.  Sound should enhance a performance, not degrade it. That was definitely not the case with some of the Traverse shows.

A few venues also suffered from over-enthusiastic (or just incompetent) sound technicians who ramped up the volume of pre-show music to a level that made conversation impossible.  One show at the Gilded Balloon forced us to get out earplugs while waiting for the show to start.  Given that the perceived wisdom at the Fringe is that ticket sales depend on word of mouth recommendations, preventing conversation with people you’re sitting next to seems particularly self-destructive to the show’s revenue, as well as the audience’s hearing.  I know that the Fringe is a major technical challenge with sound engineers trying to run far too many shows.  That has always been a problem, but a growing number seem to have little idea of what they’re doing.

In terms of hearing accessibility, I’d hoped for a bit more this year, especially given the Traverse’s press release about Auracast.  On the plus side, the content of what was on stage raised the profile of hearing, and “The Singer” was a superb demonstration of how to do it properly.  I’m hoping that next year, with more understanding of Auracast and support for it in more hearing aids and earbuds, the experience will be far more solid.

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Within manufacturing circles it has become a constant complaint that the cost of UK energy is crippling industry, with Ed Miliband’s NetZero policies placing an almost impossible burden on companies trying to compete internationally.  Whether he will supplant Maggie as the chief architect of UK manufacturing decline is something only time will tell, but there was a collective sigh of relief when he was exiled to the Foreign Office.  So, what do these new announcements mean for UK manufacturing and technology?

The plan to encourage youngsters to take a more practical route to a career is very welcome.  Part of it had already been signalled by the recent consultation on the future of vocational V-Levels.  Burnham’s new rhetoric sounds positive, writing that “in the age of AI, practical and technical skills haven’t become less valuable – they’ve become more valuable than ever. Britain will need brilliant engineers, electricians and cybersecurity experts more than ever before.  For the first time, technical education will be at the heart of our curriculum, not bolted onto the sides.”  He added that “for too long, students had been told to take academic subjects and that a technical education should be valued as much as a university degree”.  For those of us who have been promoting STEM for years, that’s music to the ears. 

What’s slightly worrying is that the rationale for this change of policy doesn’t seem to be about strengthening UK manufacturing, but a hope that it might be a lever to reduce the growing number of young school leavers who are Not in Employment, Education or Training, otherwise known as NEETs.  The cost of supporting that growing number is becoming a worry for the Treasury, who need to cut the associated welfare bill.  Andy Burnham has said he’s “on a mission” to reduce the number of NEETs, which is something that I’m sure everyone would support,  But preparing them for manufacturing jobs is only a viable strategy if the conditions are in place to expand manufacturing.  That means reducing energy prices and the cost of employing staff.  Without those changes, it’s eerily reminiscent of Maggie Thatcher’s use of youth training schemes to massage the employment statistics back in the 1980s.  Good for political PR, but no help for UK industry.

Sadly, Andy Burnham’s view that a technical education should be valued as much as an academic one doesn’t seem to apply to his choice of cabinet ministers.  After they were appointed, the Higher Education Policy Institute looked at their first degrees:

Only one minister – the Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, has a first degree in a science subject, although she never pursued that career, going straight into political campaigning.  These numbers show that over half of the cabinet studied politics in some form.  Most of the cabinet ministersm have never had what the majority of people would consider to be a real job.  A similar lack of real world experience applies to most of the rest, although both Angela Rayner and Annaliese Midgely have the benefit of getting out and doing stuff rather than going to university.  Something which Burnham’s new initiative should encourage.

When you stop to think about it, the overabundance of cabinet members who studied politics makes little sense.  These are all people, who at sixteen or seventeen years old, decided (or were encouraged) to do a politics degree.  At that point they had minimal real-world experience, but set foot on the politics treadmill and have never got off.  While the rest of us have been out working and learning about real life, they’ve been climbing the slippery poles of local politics and Westminster, living inside a self-reflecting bubble.  Most are well intentioned, but it’s a selection process which seems to be designed to produce the people least competent to govern.  It almost impossible to argue that this is the best way to select members of Parliament, as recent experience has proven.  But that’s me applying an evidence-based analysis that most of them would not recognise.

I use evidence-base advisedly, as that’s the foundation of what you learn in STEM subjects, but which is so often missing in politics.  We need our ministers to evaluate decisions by thinking about consequences and risk, and not just making knee-jerk reactions.  That lack of risk analysis has been apparent across all parties for most of the last two decades.  It’s a skill which needs to be learnt.  Without it, we see the same mistakes being made again and again.  It’s why our energy prices are the highest in Europe, killing our industrial competitiveness.  It’s why HS2 has been so wasteful.  It’s why we are seeing the same thing happen with the Lower Thames Crossing.  It’s why we need real world experience in Parliament.

In terms of the failure to understand risk, there’s no worse example than Teresa May’s NetZero bill.  Few people remember that it was kicked off by Labour’s Rachel Reeves, who, as chair of the BEIS committee, pressed for a net zero emissions bill.  She strongly supported a target without questioning its cost to the nation.  With Ed Miliband’s subsequent help, that duo have dealt a death blow to UK manufacturing.  That’s apparent in the World Bank’s figures on UK manufacturing as a percentage of GDP.

After the decline of the nineties and early 2000s, UK manufacturing began to grow.  But as the subsidies loaded onto energy prices started to bite, it faltered and fell.  Covid hit it further, but it managed to bounce back, until even higher energy prices and Rachel Reeves’ increased taxation on employment caused it to plummet. 

When the NetZero bill came before Parliament, MPs should have asked pertinent questions.  Hardly any did, failing to understand the consequences.  The main dissenting voices in the debate came from the two backbenchers – Labour’s Graham Stringer and Conservative Kemi Badenoch, both of whom questioned its effect on energy costs, industrial impacts, and practical estimates for infrastructure and workforce requirements.  Stringer and Badenoch seem an unlikely pair, but they have something in common.  They both have a science background and have had real jobs in industry.  That’s an unusual background in British politics.

There is no question that we need to address NetZero, as does every other country in the world.  However, no other country has adopted the approach of Miliband and Reeves, which is currently destroying our manufacturing base.  We need to expand our capabilities to make the products that will help mitigate and reverse climate change.  Most in the manufacturing industry consider the Miliband and Reeves policy as tantamount to national treason.

If we consider why no other country made the same mistake, one answer may be the background of their MPs.  After the last election I did a count of how many MPs had real experience of working in science and technology.  The House of Commons claimed it had risen to 110, but that relied on counting subjects like “Economic Science”.  Economics is not a science, nor are many of the other degrees that the Commons selected to try and tick the STEM box.  If you narrow it down to those who had got their hands dirty, I reckoned that it was 21, representing just 3.2% of our MPs.  Elsewhere in Europe, that percentage is closer to 10%.  That may well be the reason they aren’t killing their manufacturing bases. 

This lack of science and technology experience is worrying.  Like it or not, our lives depend on it, and we need policies to ensure that the UK is good at it, rather than the Reeves / Miliband approach of policies which constrict it.  As the geo-political climate becomes more turbulent, the UK needs to be able to ensure security and living standards.  Technical sovereignty is not just subsidising a steel plant; it’s understanding the supply chain of everything we use.  We can’t make everything ourselves, but we need to ensure we have access to what we need, and to leverage our position to maintain access to the rest.  That means identifying and supporting the expertise that makes the UK important to others within each technology chain.  I suspect few of the cabinet could sustain a conversation on those topics for more than a few minutes.

Having said which, Andy Burnham’s plans are a good step forward, but they’re a tiny one, and we need many more of them.  We also need to make sure that our MPs understand the goal is to grow Britain’s technical independence and not just massage the number of NEETs, all of whom deserve jobs when they’ve finished their training.  Andy Burnham talks of his father’s long-term career in manufacturing as a key influence in his upbringing and work ethic.  We need to bring that back for a new generation.  UK manufacturing will be different in the future, but I am convinced it can be successful.  We need to convince our politicians that they correct their mistakes and concentrate on manufacturing’s future.

As a footnote to anyone who thinks I’m overegging the difficulty of manufacturing, let me ask you a question – “Could you make a pencil?”  And “could you make a factory to make a million of them?”  Whatever your answer, go and download and read Leonard Read’s short essay “I, Pencil”.  It was published in 1958 and remains one of the best descriptions of how the simplest thing contains complexity.  It opens people’s eyes to what lies behind the everyday and advocates establishing an environment that lets creativity flourish.  I would encourage everyone, and especially everyone in Parliament, to read it.

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Looking at the spectators sitting in the main courts, it looks as if they’re aging, possibly because you need a hefty Civil Service defined-benefits pension to afford the tickets.  Which mean that a fair number will have hearing loss.  According to Wimbledon’s Access Guides, there are Hearing Loops located at key points around the grounds, but it doesn’t mention if they’re in the courts.  Even if they are. reinforcing sound for a tennis audience poses some interesting questions.

Most of the time when you’re listening to live entertainment, what’s going on, along with its associated sound is in front of you.  Sport stadia add an extra complexity, as most spectators sit on one of the long sides of the stadium.  So, as far as the sound is concerned, one half of the spectators hear the mirror image that the other half hears.  Which means that when Djokovic serves, one half hears the thwack and grunt on their left, while the other half hears it on their right.  For an event like Wimbledon, that gives the accessibility crew a problem – what do they feed into the sound feed for the best accessibility experience?

For a hearing loop, it’s an easy answer, as the loop will almost certainly only support mono.  Listeners can hear the amplified sound from the court, but they’ll be back in a pre-1957 mono era, before stereo became a commercial reality.  Seventy years later, ignoring any subsequent progress in audio technology isn’t demonstrating much progress. 

But it doesn’t need to be constrained.  When we were designing the new Bluetooth LE Audio standards, the problem of tennis courts came up.  We realised that with separate left and right earbuds or hearing aids, it would be trivial to flip the sound around, so that listeners could choose which way round they wanted to hear the audio.

In the case of a tennis match, the key input would be the sounds from the court, probably captured with respect to the umpire at the net, including their pronouncements of the score and match progress.  That would be fed to an Auracast transmitter as a stereo feed, and spectators could select which channel corresponded to their left and right, based on where they were sitting.  Spectators at either end could mix the two channels to provide mono, with the option to change the balance, so that the end nearer to them sounded closer.

What we didn’t anticipate was the lack of imagination of product designers.  Almost everyone working in audio design today has spent their life designing with the constraints of a one-to-one link, where sound isn’t shared or manipulated.  We’re just seeing the start of spatial audio, but it’s very much the exception, not the rule.  Instead of getting excited by the new possibilities, most developers are desperately tying to ignore them, shoe-horning their new products into the same old shoeboxes.

Which is a shame, as we can now do so much more with audio.  The new Auracast capabilities, which are coming to earbuds, hearing aids and speakers will transform the way we use sound, both for voice and music.  Events like Wimbledon should be used as an opportunity to experiment and showcase the opportunities.  We’ve seen theatres and public venues embrace Auracast, but sport seems to be dragging its heels.  Whoever may win at Wimbledon this year, let’s hope Auracast gets seeded next year.

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There’s a consultation on whether that’s a good idea at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/plug-in-solar, but in typical DESNZ fashion, it opened last week and closes next week.   So if you’ve got an opinion, you have until 30^th June to respond.

The principle of plug-in solar is simple.  You get a package which contains a solar panel, and an inverter – an electronic box which converts the low voltage, DC output of the solar panel into an AC mains supply. The inverter has a normal 13A mains plug on it, but when you plug it into one of your sockets it doesn’t take power out, it pushes the solar power into your home mains supply.  That’s power you don’t need to pay for, which reduces your electricity bill.  It’s as simple as that.  Plug-in solar units are already popular in countries like Germany, where people install them on balconies and shed rooves, but so far, they’ve not been legal to install in the UK.

A typical system looks like this:

When the sun shines on the solar panel, 230V mains appears on the plug.  That’s what’s worrying DESNZ.  If you were to touch it, you’d get an electric shock, which is obviously a bad thing.  To prevent this happening, the inverter needs to include something called anti-islanding protection.  (Despite the name, this has nothing to do with Brexit.)  It’s a way of sensing when a local electricity microgenerator is operating in isolation.  Although you may not consider it, your plug-in solar panel and inverter is actually your own personal micro power station.  If the anti-islanding circuitry doesn’t detect that a mains voltage is already present on the 13A plug, either from the grid or any other solar panels you might have, it isolates the 13A plug from the inverter in around 50 milliseconds.  Even if you got a shock, that’s not long enough to do you any harm.

There’s a lot of other things that the inverter needs to do, such as tracking and synchronising to the mains voltage and frequency.  This means that inverters for plug-in solar need to be quite sophisticated designs.  However, issues with making them work reliably have been ironed out over the past few years in the German deployments, so there’s no real reason why well designed systems shouldn’t go on sale in the UK.  Any extra power you generate beyond your own usage will find its way to the grid, unless you also install a battery.   It’s debatable whether you’ll be paid for that electricity, as to do so would probably mean you’d need to get your meter changed.  As these plug-in solar units are being limited to 800W, your utility probably isn’t interested in doing that.  But plug-in solar should still save you money and pay back over 4 – 5 years.

That’s the theory.  To test that premise, DESNZ commissioned a company called Arceio to look at current plug-in solar packages and assessed how well they worked.  That’s been published at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a32bfea0bea238415c9a1c0/Plug-in-solar-PV-study.pdf and forms the evidence behind the consultation.

It’s a thorough study, but there’s quite a big “BUT” about it.  In the UK, we have a bit of a penchant for regulations.  Where wiring is concerned, you’re not allowed to make any modification  without notifying your local council’s building control before you start, or employing a registered electrician.  There are building control regulations ,along with the IET’s wiring regulations which you’re meant to read and have to follow, even if you’re only replacing a socket.  That’s the theory and DESNZ and the IET seem to believe it’s how things work.  If you’ve ever walked into a B&Q or Screwfix you’ll know that you can buy almost any electrical product and take it home to install yourself.  I assume that millions of people do, which makes quite a nonsense of any notification procedure. 

This report ignores that reality and recommends that plug-in solar should be a notifiable device.  In other words, if you buy one, the retailer has to tell the appropriate Government body, who can potentially check you’ve done it properly or that you’re “competent”.  It’s the same principle that used to be applied to TVs.  Every shop that sold a TV had to tell the TV licensing authority the address of the purchaser.  They would then check if you had a TV licence and if not, they’d send around a TV detector van to see if it was working, after which they’d take you to court.  Whether Ed Miliband is planning a fleet of electric PV detector vans is something we’re not told.  As he can’t drive, at least he won’t be out chasing offenders himself.

What is more worrying, and something that say a lot about the people who did the testing, is that it is all viewed through the lens of wiring regulations.  There’s virtually no mention of security.  As that’s what the “S” in DESNZ stands for, that’s quite an omission.  All of the microinverters that were tested come with an associated phone app, which presumably uses a Wi-Fi connection.  That means they can potentially be hacked.  If their firmware is changed, the anti-islanding function could be disabled, changing them from a money saving product to a life-threatening product. 

Penetration testing, which measures a device’s susceptibility to hacking, should have been a key feature of the test, but it’s not.  The report confines itself to the electrics and whether they’ll withstand typical British weather.  It feels that it’s an exercise in applying IET wiring regulations, with no notion that the world has moved on.  It’s not the first time we’ve seen this happen.  In DESNZ’s former life as DECC, they made the same mistake with smart meters, which meant that the first million or so meters had to be replaced with secure ones after a GCHQ review found the inadequate.

It also skates over the real things that we should worry about with plug-in solar, which are the everyday ones.  Will they be mounted properly?  They are far more likely to kill someone by falling from a fifth floor balcony, where they’ve been tied on with a piece of string, than by electrocuting someone.  Will people be able to modify them, as we’ve seen happen with electric scooters and bikes, and will we be able to prevent the sale of non-compliant devices.  Those are already available to purchase from web retailers.  Fixating on wiring regulations and the arcane considerations of technical guilds won’t help us save money on energy, or get to net zero.  Germany has shown that plug-in solar can work.  What the UK needs is to see them on sale in LIDL and Screwfix.  Which is what we should be telling DESNZ.

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The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is  a parable of Hitler’s rise to power, conceived as a parallel story based on Chicago gangsters fighting for control of the vegetable trade.  It’s an important piece, not least because of the warning of its final line “The beast that bore him is in heat again”.  But enough of UI for the moment.  Here’s what I learnt about User Interfaces for hearing aids.

Just before the performance started, I became aware of a conversation behind me, where a man was complaining to his partner about the difficulty of using his assistive listening device to tune in to the correct audio stream for the performance.  The theatre at Stratford has put a lot of effort into assistive support, with both telecoil inductive loops and assistive audio headsets which patrons can borrow during a performance.  That makes sense, as it has one of the older audience demographics.  Every time I venture up to Stratford, I feel that I’m in the youngest quartile of the audience (and I’m in my seventies).  Based on the general statistics for hearing loss, that means that there are probably at least 150 audience members at each show who would benefit from some kind of hearing reinforcement.  Which is presumably why the theatre is equipped with a telecoil system.  Except, when you walk in to the auditorium, you see:

There was a sign telling hearing loop users that the theatre’s telecoil system had been turned off.  The reason is that the production uses electric guitars, and apparently their pickups are affected by the audio from the telecoil’s inductive loop.  Who knew?  This is presumably a particular problem in any auditorium with a thrust stage, which would be most theatres that have tried to reproduce a Shakespearean setting.  In Shakespeare’s day, audiences wouldn’t generally have lived long enough to develop hearing loss.  And certainly not long enough to have the chance to experience an electric guitar.  But those messages don’t seem to have got through to modern theatre designers.

The RSC do offer alternative audio enhancement headsets, which is what the gentleman behind me appeared to be struggling with, but I wondered how many of them they had available.  I suspect it was probably fewer than the number of audience members wearing hearing aids.  What’s more interesting would be knowing when the director was told that if he wanted electric guitars it would prevent hearing aid wearers using the building’s telecoil?  Was that pointed out at the start, or was a sticking plaster applied at the end?

As the lights went down, another issue presented itself.  The gentlemen to my right, who was presumably wearing hearing aids or earbuds obviously wanted to adjust the volume, but needed to do it using the app on his phone.  While his wife frantically whispered to him to turn the display off, or put it away, you could feel others around him tensing and inwardly demonising anyone who turned on their phone screen during a performance.

In both cases, you can’t blame the user.  Neither should have been put in this position, and were only there because nobody thought through the user experience.  I’ve worked on wireless specifications for many years, and most of the time they’re predominantly written by protocol engineers – low-level hardware programmers who don’t generally have direct experience of the way that products are likely to be used.  That’s why we have these issues.  I’ve been heavily involved with Auracast – the new Bluetooth audio standard which is designed for hearing reinforcement and audio sharing.  Although I don’t wear a hearing aid, I carry around a small telecoil headset to see how often inductive loops work, and it’s not been an edifying experience.  Often, they don’t.  My hope is that Auracast, which will work with both consumer earbuds and headsets, as well as hearing aids, will provide an easier experience, but many more segments of industry need to talk to each other if it’s is going to become a really seamless experience.

The final piece of learning came at the end of the interval.  The cast of gangsters, led by Arturo Ui ,were roaming round the audience trying to “persuade” people to sign up to their protection racket.  They’d obviously worked out likely situations to let them pounce on victims, one of which was to look out for anyone using a mobile phone just before the start of the second Act.  Mark Gatiss, who was giving an incredibly impressive and menacing performance as Arturo Ui, crept up on the man behind me, who was setting up his assisted listening device, presumably thinking it was a mobile phone.  As his Arturo Ui persona launched into a spiel about the evils of using mobile phones in a theatre he was rebutted with a firm “that’s my hearing aid”, followed by an ongoing commentary berating the fact that it didn’t seem to work.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor involved with a piece of audience participation slink away so quickly, as Mark Gatiss recognised the impending rabbit hole of getting trapped in in technical support.  In this instance, being Ui trumped the prospect of UI explanations.

It was fascinating to see these little incidents, as they highlighted how much more needs to be done to make hearing assistance seamless.  The evening illustrated a succession of little problems that cause unnecessary frustration because designers, whether of products, apps or service infrastructure, haven’t thought things through properly.  None of the problems were insoluble, or even particularly difficult to fix, but there are still design and societal issues that need to be taken into account.

As for the show, it is a brilliant production.  With luck, it will transfer and be more widely seen.  One other positive is that this was the first time that I’ve seen an actor on stage wearing hearing aids, other than in a part that specifically required them.  I’d not thought about just how rare it is to see anyone wearing them on stage or screen, where they should be as common as glasses.  Sadly, they’re not.  It ended up being a very enjoyable evening, providing so much more to think about beyond the very important political message of the play.

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Ever since phones started supporting audio, there’s been a challenge for phone manufacturers about who would be responsible for the overall audio experience.  At the start, phones would ship with relatively cheap wired earbuds – a model that Sony invented with the Walkman, but consumers quickly became dissatisfied with the quality of these buds.  As phones almost all had 3.5mm audio jacks (and the few who didn’t quickly changed to include them), users could buy any brand of headset to use with their phone.  It was a boon for existing headphone manufacturers like Bose, Sony and AKG, as well as an opportunity for new entrants like Beats, who built brands on the lifestyle opportunity that arrived a few years later with music streaming.

Phone manufacturers, aware that they were losing a market opportunity to headset companies, responded by developing or acquiring their own offerings.  Samsung bought Harman (AKG), Apple bought Beats, whilst LG licensed technology from Bang & Olufsen

The next step in audio development came with Apple’s removal of the 3.5mm audio jack.  That wasn’t driven by any audio consideration, but by mechanical and economic ones.  The jack socket took up a relatively large amount of space inside a very crowded phone.  It was difficult to make it waterproof and it cost money, albeit only a few cents.  But saving a few cents on each phone is significant when you’re making hundreds of millions of them.   However, before they could remove the jack, Apple needed earbuds which would work using their existing Bluetooth chip,  They met that challenge brilliantly with the introduction of their AirPods, which became the most successful consumer electronic product ever, achieving sales of over 100 million units in just three years.  Counterpoint Research have calculated that since their launch, AirPods have contributed a cumulative revenue of $100 billion for Apple, making them Apple’s third most important product line behind iPhones and Macs.

Cumulative revenue from AirPod sales – Counterpoint Research

Apple’s AirPods weren’t the first Bluetooth wireless earbuds, but they set the standard for engineering and audio quality.  Apple designed them to integrate seamlessly with the IoS software in the phone, providing a compelling user experience.  More recently, they’ve extended the AirPod brand to over-the-ear headphones, competing with Beats, which they acquired in 2014. 

To Apple’s surprise, AirPods were a hit with owners of Android phones.  (The only other time Apple had done that was when they released iTunes for Windows which, according to the excellent book “Apple in China”, went against Steve Jobs’ intentions).  The user experience of AirPods on Android wasn’t quite as slick as it was for iPhone owners, but it was still more impressive than the earbuds made by other manufacturers. In a stroke, Apple had defined how audio should be done, and become the market leader.

AirPods provided a textbook example of how to build an experience that delights by owning the whole ecosystem.  But the inherent interoperability built into the Bluetooth specifications meant that others could benefit as well.

While competitors concentrated on catching up with AirPods, something else was happening behind the scenes.  Engineers from across the industry (including Apple) were working on a new Bluetooth standard that included a feature called Auracast.  Auracast allows users to share audio.  It means that you can share the music stream on your phone with your friends.  If you have Auracast in your TV, you can all listen to it silently without waking the kids or annoying the neighbours.  Auracast users can each change their volume individually, so there’s no longer a fight for the volume control, and it can be picked up by hearing aids, letting people with and without hearing loss get the optimum listening experience. 

As with all new technical innovations, it takes some time to get critical mass in the market.  The first Auracast products were hearing aids, followed by small transmitters which could be fitted to TVs, mainly aimed at people with hearing loss.  These have been enthusiastically taken up by theatres, community centres and places of worship, who see them as a low cost way of helping their audiences.  As the number of these Auracast broadcast transmitters have increased, Auracast has also started appearing in consumer earbuds, with models available from Sony, Samsung, LG, Technics and Sennheiser.  There are also some very impressive ones from new entrants who think they can take sales away from Apple.  A good example is Earfun’s 4+, which retail at around $60.

Designing an Auracast earbud or headset is relatively easy.  An Auracast earbud will receive all of the same Bluetooth audio streams that every other earbud does, and add the capability to find and render an Auracast broadcast stream.  It only needs to receive and render one audio stream at a time, so it’s a fairly simple design evolution.

For phone and PC manufacturers it becomes a lot more complicated.  Although users rarely think about it, your phone or PC may be connected to many different Bluetooth devices at the same time.  While you’re listening to your music on your earbuds, you may be using your watch to change the volume or select the next track you want to play.  Your phone may also be talking to a fitness ring, or taking data from a glucose monitor.  An app may be using Bluetooth to open your door, or setting up your pet feeder.  Managing all of these concurrent Bluetooth operations at the same time is a very complex task.  For a phone manufacturer, or more specifically, a company developing the underlying phone operating system, which means Apple with their IoS, or Google with Android, they also need to work out how to support the functionality of the Auracast broadcasts, as the same time as managing all of the other Bluetooth connections.  Because Auracast has a very low delay between sound coming in and being rendered in your ear, there are some very complex priorities and scheduling to ensure everything works together and to prevent any glitches in the audio.  That’s really hard.

When Auracast was announced, most of the industry thought that mobile phones would determine when it would reach critical mass.  Throughout Bluetooth’s history, phone support was the gate for each new feature to take off.  But this time it would be different, as some of the people working on Auracast realised that there was a parallel opportunity in TVs.  Adding broadcast to a TV allows everyone to watch at the volume they want, which is especially important if some of the audience  are wearing hearing aids.  In the future, Auracast will also enable advanced features like multiple language streams for the same programme.  They also see it as a key competitive edge for a year when they expect bumper sales, as people buy new TVs to watch the world cup. 

For a TV manufacturers, adding Auracast to their TV is a lot simpler than it is for a phone manufacturer to add Auracast to a phone.  TVs don’t have the complexity of connections that a phone has – adding Auracast just needs then to slot in a new Bluetooth audio stream.  Which is exactly what they’re doing.  Samsung, LG, Panasonic and Philips have all announced that their latest TVs include Auracast, which means that by the end of 2026, almost 150 million people will have access to Auracast in their homes and will want earbuds and headphone which support it.  That’s a great opportunity for any headset or earbud manufacturer who supports Auracast, which is almost all of them except Apple.

If Auracast adoption had been left to the phone operating system manufacturers, they would be in charge of the point where it reached critical mass.  Google is currently ahead, with support first appearing in their Version 14 stack, which runs in the Pixel 9 and above, but they don’t yet have many compelling Auracast apps.  Samsung are also supporting Auracast in their new handsets.  Apple have announced that they are “very excited” about Auracast, but there’s no mention of a timescale for products.  What neither appear to have expected is the enthusiasm for Auracast shown by the TV industry, 

That’s why Apple has a dilemma.  Current AirPods with their H2 chip are almost certainly capable of supporting Auracast, but Apple won’t realistically turn the functionality on until their iPhone software supports it, because that would mean that AirPods would work “better” with Android phones than they would with iPhones.  However, as more and more consumers are exposed to Auracast from their new TV, they’re going to stop buying AirPods and start buying competing products.  They can choose from a growing range from low cost, but very competent units like Earfun to top end models from Technics and Sennheiser. 

I have immense admiration for Apple’s AirPods.  Designing that small a product with that level of performance is an engineering miracle.  It is quite deservedly the fastest selling consumer electronics product ever and has almost certainly been an amazing cash cow for Apple.  But the longer it takes for Apple to enable the Auracast capabilities in their AirPods, the more they will lose market share.  By the end of the year, the overall brand share could look like this:

Once you lose customers, it’s difficult to get them back, so you don’t want to discourage them.  I suspect that’s the reason the AirPod Max 2s had such a low key launch.  Apple knows that the lack of Auracast is the elephant in the room and would like to put off that conversation for as long as possible.

Whether to turn on Auracast support in the AirPod range is almost certainly not at the top of the list of things for John Ternus to do when he takes over from Tim Cook in September, but it’s an important decision.  If Apple turns on Auracast support in AirPods, it’s an acknowledgment that control of their ecosystem does not ultimately trump market leadership.  If they wait for iPhone support, then it may be a sign that Apple is heading back to the more traditional view of a company that demands customer loyalty and is closing up its ecosystem.  The dilemma is that the longer it takes Apple to turn Auracast support on in its products, the more likely it is that they’ll have to explain a sales chart that looks like this:

That’s not a good prospect for what has just been identified as your third most important product line.

Whatever John Ternus’ decision, this is going to be a fascinating year for audio, as TV manufacturers take the initiative and potentially push Apple out of their dominant position in earbuds.  I’m looking forward to seeing how it pans out and how Apple decides it wants to play its hand.

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Introducing Auracast

Auracast is a new Bluetooth technology that lets you stream audio to multiple different headsets or speakers.  It’s designed for situations where people want to share audio, whether that’s personal music or public audio.  Its development was started by the hearing aid industry to make it easier to stream voice and music to hearing aids, based on their experience with telecoil hearing loops.  However, the ultimate aim was for it to transform all sorts of consumer applications with a new generation of earbuds, speakers and headphones.  It’s really fast, so there’s no noticeable delay when you’re watching a film or video, it’s lower power, much easier to control and it’s longer range.  But it’s taken some time to get here.  However, 2026 looks as if it will be the tipping point, when it moves into the mainstream.

Why does wireless technology take so long to become available?

The problem with wireless technologies is that they need two ends – two different products. both of which can communicate with the same wireless standard.  That complicates things, because they need to work with each other – something that the industry calls interoperability.  There are lots of great inventions which don’t need any interoperability.  Simple inventions like selfie sticks and air fryers just need to be built and sold, as they work by themselves.

With wireless products, the new user experience needs different companies, often from different industries to work together, which is not the way most companies traditionally do things.  They generally like to do their own thing, so have to learn a new way of working together.  It also generates a chicken and egg situation where there needs to be enough of one side available for the other to be worth buying.  That happened when mobile phones arrived,  Not many people bought one until there were enough base stations to get a signal.  Once coverage spread across a country, sales of phones rocketed.  The same thing happened with Bluetooth; chips started appearing in phones in 2001, but hardly anyone used them until there was enough critical mass to persuade headset manufacturers and the automotive industry to provide the other end of the connection.  Wi-Fi chips started getting into laptops even earlier, but for years, there were no access points to connect them to.  It’s always comes back to that same chicken and egg situation, where one side needs to attain critical mass before the market can take off.

Over the past few years, the first Auracast products have been appearing on the market, but nobody was quite sure where the critical mass would come from.  Most of the industry thought it would happen in smartphones, but instead, it’s coming from an unexpected sector – TVs.

How TVs came to lead the way

The TV industry isn’t normally associated with audio innovation.  In general, they rely on other companies to make soundbars and speakers for anyone who wants better or louder audio, but with Auracast they’ve seen the potential of completely new topologies, where multiple listeners can access new features to enhance their viewing.  The world’s largest TV manufacturer – Samsung, along with LG, Philips and Panasonic have all announced that their 2026 models will include Auracast.  Looking at predicted sales volumes from analysts like Omdia and Counterpoint, it means that by the end of the year, around 150 million viewers will have Auracast in their homes, with the ability to connect a new generation of earbuds, headphones, speakers and hearing aids to their TVs. That’s the critical mass that the market needs to bring in the next audio revolution.  Once users experience it and start asking for it, it puts enormous pressure on other sectors to follow and include Auracast support in their products. 

What makes this timing doubly important is the fact that the TV industry expects this to be a bumper year for sales, driven by the 2026 World Cup, which is exactly the push that Auracast needs.

Why TVs need Auracast

If you talk to any audiologist, they’;ll tell you that TVs bring them most of their customers.  One of the first signs of hearing loss is the growing argument between partners about the level of the TV volume, and the fight for custody of the remote control.  That’s the point where the person turning the volume up should get a hearing test, but there’s normally years of simmering domestic tension before it reaches that point.  Auracast may not get people to a hearing test any earlier, but it can do a lot for domestic harmony.

Adding a Bluetooth Auracast transmitter to a TV allows it to wirelessly broadcast the audio signal to headphones, hearing aids, earbuds and soundbars at the same  time as the TV’s internal speakers are playing the sound.  “At the same time” is very important, as if there’s any significant delay, then the audio appears out of sync with what you’re watching.  If there’s ambient audio present from the TV’s speakers, any delay in getting the sound to a Bluetooth headset is perceived as an echo, making it even more difficult for a listener to understand.  Because of that, one of the key design parameters for Auracast was to ensure that the delay, which is technically referred to as “latency” is sufficiently low that there’s no problem.  Everyone in the room, whether they’re listening to the audio on a speaker, hearing aid or earbud will hear it at exactly the same time.

No more fights over volume

Although Auracast is all about sharing audio, the one thing you don’t need to share is the volume.  Unlike a standard TV, which is always too loud or too quiet for some of its viewers, with Auracast, everyone can control their own volume.  Each hearing aid, earbud or headset provides personal volume control, so the arguments about volume disappear. 

I hate Football / Cookery / Crime

Although the TV manufacturers predict it will be a bumper year for new TV sales, not everyone is going to be thrilled by the prospect of the World Cup booming around the home.  In a fair number, there’s likely to be a rush to buy partners the latest Auracast earbuds and headsets to go with the new TV, so that they can enjoy their football in silence.  They could be the ideal Birthday present from long suffering spouses, who may find that they receive a similar present once the World Cup finishes and the TV returns to its normal fare of cookery and crime series.

You can still hear it in the Kitchen / Bathroom / Bedroom

Auracast came into being to provide a more flexible way of sharing sound in public venues, such as theatres and cinemas, where it was envisaged as an evolution from the current Telecoil hearing loops. 

To achieve that, it’s designed to have a greater range than most people associate with Bluetooth headsets., which provides another advantage for TV watching.  If you’re watching a live program and desperately need to go to the kitchen to get a new beer, or the bathroom to get rid of the previous one, you should still be able to hear the commentary without missing any key moments. 

It’s all about tipping points

As with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, broadcast TV and mobile phones, the move from future promise to everyday usage is all about the tipping point that comes when there is a critical mass of devices.  Initially people purchasing these TVs may not realise they contain Auracast, but as the momentum builds and users appreciate the advantages it offers, it will become the “must-have” feature for every new TV purchase.  The 2026 World Cup is being billed as the greatest global sporting event.  Its enduring legacy may be that it’s the event that propels Auracast from technical innovation to an everyday experience that changes the way the world thinks about audio.

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