Amazon Christmas in July – SubPac wearable subwoofer and smart bike helmet
At London’s Old Billingsgate Fish Market, pictured above, Amazon and its partners displayed hundreds of new products that they expect to be big sellers during the festive season.
As ever with these increasingly popular Christmas in July events, there is actually little that it completely new. Most of the products are already available, although many have only been released in the last few months. For new technology the Amazon Launchpad area is undoubtedly the most interesting part of the show.
For those who don’t know about Launchpad it’s where Amazon works with start-ups to help them get their products on the market, in return – obviously – for making sure they are on the Amazon store first (albeit on a non-exclusive basis). This year there were a few products we have seen before including Curiscope’s Virtuali-tee augmented reality T-Shirts.
Designed mainly for kids, these educational T-Shirts allow you to ‘see’ your vital organs inside your body via the app. A new feature even makes it possible to measure your own heartbeat via the app and then use the same heart beat to show your heart pumping inside your body. You can see how the Curiscope T-Shirts work in this YouTube video I filmed at the New Scientist Show last year.
However, there were also products that we haven’t seen before although they have been available for a little while. One of these is the SubPac wearable sub-woofer, priced at around £300.
If you haven’t got space in your house for a sub-woofer then a wearable sub-woofer, like this model from SubPac, is really the next best thing – and more neighbour friendly too!
It’s a little cumbersome strapping this thing to your back but you really do ‘feel’ the bass through your back. Great for gamers and surround sound fans although probably not something you can wear all the time! You can see my YouTube video below.
Also look out this Christmas for a new smart motorbike helmet from Taiwanese company, Jarvish Inc. Still in the production stage, it promises to be a big hit with bikers when it launches on Amazon Launchpad later in the year.
As well as a built in video camera which enables you to record and share footage of your rides via social media so you don’t have to strap a camera to your existing helmet, it also comes with built in speakers and voice control via Bluetooth.
You can see our YouTube interview with Younger Liang, Co-Founder and CTO of Jarvis Inc. below:
