Varibel hearing eyeglasses eye Asian market

Does hearing actually go first as you get long in the tooth? For those who've always feared looking their vintage when armed with dead giveaways like in-ear hearing aids and bifocals, help is fortunately on the way. Taking a cue from Oakley's MP3-playing Thump perhaps, here comes eyewear that hears.

You won't be getting bionic hearing. But what you have is a souped-up hearing aid built into regular eyeglasses. Embedded over the length of each spectacle arm are four tiny microphones which transmit sounds from the front and simultaneously blocks background noise.

This creates "directional sensitivity", so sounds coming from the direction of the wearer’s gaze are amplified while those from ambient surroundings are dampened. This helps to make conversations clearer in noisy environments where standard hearing aids can often be thwarted by background din.

Charging is even simplier. The rechargeable batteries are hidden in the ends of the arms, so it's an easy matter of docking the ends of the frames into a special recharging stand overnight to juice up.

Based on technology developed at the Delft University of Technology, Varibel, which produced the "hearing glasses" in partnership with Philips, aims to showcase this at the upcoming SICEX 2008 organized by Singapore's Silver Industry Committee. Couple this with light-adaptive and no-line bifocal progressive lenses, and being geriatric may not seem such, er, a setback after all.

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