Fauna Audio Eyewear: A Revolutionary Blend of Sound and Vision?

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Fauna’s new audio glasses sound pretty revolutionary on paper. They come with some excellent USound speaker technology, which should mean they perform as well as you can expect an open-ear audio wearable to.

They offer a range of designer models, so even the style-conscious get a say. Plus, with a range of lenses and a reasonable price tag, they seem like a neat piece of kit.

But are they more style than substance? Or do these glasses have applications outside the spheres of music, audiobooks, and calls.

A Tour of Fauna’s Sonic Spectacles

On the face of it, the Fauna glasses look, in the main, like any regular pair of spectacles. Save, of course, for the arms, which maintain a fairly bulky silhouette thanks to the electronics stowed away inside them.

We reviewed the Memor Havana model. These feature a wayfarer-style frame, in an attractive tortoiseshell colorway. The side of the frame carries the fauna logo, with the arms in black and then the ends repeating the tortoiseshell from the frame.

The lenses in this particular model are Zeiss Duravision BlueProtect. You can also get tinted lenses or sunglasses. It is of note that you can add a prescription lens to these spectacles, so that is a definite positive for Fauna, here.

The left and right arms both feature multifunction capacitive controls (more on those functions later), with a woofer speaker on the top face of each arm and the tiny USound MEMS speaker housed on the bottom of each arm, just in front of your ear. The right arm holds the microphone for voice calls.

When you close the glasses, you will also see the contact points used to charge the frames. These sit snugly against the contact points in the case when the glasses need a shot of juice in the tank.

The case, as mentioned, also charges the spectacles. It is a little on the bulky side, but then it houses a battery and a pair of glasses with thicker arms than usual, so we’ll let that one slide. It isn’t exactly a deal-breaker.

The case is a typical clamshell design, with a Type-C charging point and four charging indicators in the recess at the front. Said recess also affords purchase to get the box open. The charging case is a leather look and comes in a fetching green color.

Opening the case, you have the expected recesses for the glasses, plus the metal contacts for charging them.

And that is it! All fairly unassuming and, I might add, quite elegant looking (although that is totally subjective). Aside from the coral pink USB-C charging cable, which is such a bright color you can see it from another room. That isn’t so subtle.

How Do the Fauna Glasses Work?

As these glasses have two separate functions, we’ll deal with each, respectively.

First is the vision aspect of the Fauna eyewear. As mentioned, our test model came with Zeiss Duravision BlueProtect lenses. These lenses, as the name suggests, filter out blue light. We’ll come to how well they perform at this task, in the following section.

Other than that, the glasses offer nothing else to enhance vision. However, as said, you can swap the lenses out and turn these into a pair of shades, or prescription glasses should that be a requirement. You’ll need an optician to do that for you, though.

The second function to discuss is the sound. Both the left and right arms of the frames act as the chassis for the electronic components. So the woofer on top provides bass sounds, while the USound MEMS speaker underneath deals with the mids and the trebles. This affects the way the sound is heard, which we’ll also discuss in the performance section of this review.

The capacitive controls to the sides of the frames offer multiple functions, and these depend on the gestures used.

Music-wise, sliding your finger backward and forwards on the left arm’s outer face will increase or decrease the volume. A double-tap will pause playback. Tap and hold will result in skipping the track.

For calls, a double-tap answers the phone call, while tapping and holding cancels the call. Volume controls work the same as they would for music—with a sliding gesture to increase or decrease.

You use the right arm’s capacitive control only for activating your phone’s voice assistant. You achieve this with a nifty double-tap.

You can also use the Fauna glasses with a dedicated Fauna app. This adds some wellbeing features to the glasses, such as the “Whistles” feature, which reminds you to stand up and stretch your legs, or helps you focus with a selection of curated melodies.

Aside from that, the app is pretty lightweight and doesn’t really add a great deal of functionality to the Fauna glasses.

Is the Fauna Blue Light Filtering Any Good?

OK, so lets take a bit of a closer look at the blue light filtering and its potential applications.

It is a commonly known fact that your eyes react differently to light depending on the color. As a blue-eyed person, I can attest to the fact that my eyes are more sensitive to bright and/or intense light than those with dark-colored irises. This is why you’ll often see people with light-colored eyes squinting at the sun or vibrantly colored objects.

So, I appreciate blue light filtering as it makes me strain my eyes less. Obviously, as these are Zeiss lenses, you expect them to work. And, as they filter out blue light when you wear them, they achieve their goal. This makes them a pleasure to wear indoors and out.

Indoors, they reduce the intensity of brightly colored screens or harsh white light bulbs, affording them a softer, warmer tone. Or at least they did for me. Other wearers might find it different.

Outdoors, bright days take on a similarly less intense, warm tone, which prevents squinting to a degree, although these aren’t sunglasses so don’t have the same darkening effect as sunglasses do.

So yeah… nothing out of the ordinary to report here. They’re blue light filter lenses. They filter blue light. Job done.

On to the Fauna’s Sound Performance…

OK, so I am going to admit, I’m in two minds about the Fauna’s sound performance. There are several reasons for this.

First, beyond the volume, you have no control over the sound the Fauna glasses make. So, you can’t control the bass, mids, or treble. To this end, an equalizer function would have been a nice app feature.

Which brings me onto my next point. I don’t feel that the bass is powerful enough. As Fauna markets these as a revolutionary device for “music, audiobooks, and phone calls”, I expect to be blown away by the sound.

This is probably down to placing the woofer on the top of the arm, meaning that the sound moves away from your ears rather than being directed at your eardrum.

This would make sense, as the MEMS speaker directs the mids and trebles, from below the arm, into your ear. So, as a result, the trebles and mids sound overly accentuated, while the bass can sometimes sound nonexistent.

What I will say, though, is sound bleed is minimal with the device at low to mid volumes. This means it is still loud enough to hear music, but you can have a conversation with someone at the same time. They won’t hear the music unless they put their ears next to yours.

At higher volumes, the sound bleed may be enough to irritate other people in a quiet environment, such as on the bus or train. Certainly in a library. So you would need to remain considerate of others around you and not sit there hammering out Dimmu Borgir in a library study area.

Any Other Fauna Performance Points?

Not as such. However, I am concerned that Fauna describes these glasses as water-resistant, and I would advise caution on the part of Fauna in the language it uses here. I mean, they are water and dust-resistant, but how much?

The Fauna eyewear comes with an IP52 ingress protection rating. This tells you two things, the amount of dust it is likely to let in, and the amount of water. In that order.

So it rates the dust ingress protection at 5 out of a possible 6. This is dust protected, with limited amounts of dust permitted to enter the device without damaging the internals. It isn’t dust-proof, but it won’t be, because of the grilles over the speakers.

This is important if you buy the Fauna sunglasses. The assumption is you’ll be wearing them on hot sunny days. Therefore, if you take them to the beach, they’ll need to withstand sand.

The water ingress protection rating of 2 is a concern. While this rating does offer some protection against diagonally falling drops of rain (15 degrees angle compared to vertical raindrops, as if you can ever measure the angle of rainfall when you’re caught in a downpour) for ten minutes, I would still be very nervous about taking these out in wet conditions.

As such, I would personally advise against wearing them in the rain and I would urge Fauna to clarify and quantify what this ingress protection means to people buying its product. Simply stating the glasses are “water-resistant” isn’t sufficient, in my opinion.

To provide contrast and context, Amazon’s own audio glasses carry an IP54 rating. This would perform better in the rain, although I would still exercise caution with anything with a rating below IPX7 (the X being any given value for dust ingress, preferably no lower than 5).

The battery life is also fairly short. At four hours (which is what I squeezed out of them during testing), you won’t get a full day of continuous use out of them, if that is your intention. Bose’s audio glasses (sunglasses only) come with five-hour battery life. However, you don’t get a charging case with those.

Bluetooth, on the other hand, is superb. I can move a full 15-20 meters away from the sound source before any breakup, which is more than Fauna states in its instruction manual.

Fauna As Part of a Wellbeing Ecosystem

This is really where I felt the Fauna eyewear showed real strength; when used as part of a larger wellbeing ecosystem alongside other devices or apps, or with sounds that you wouldn’t describe as musical.

With this in mind, I am surprised that Fauna hasn’t made more of this wellbeing aspect of the product. Particularly as personal wellbeing really is a zeitgeist in the current climate. The app could easily have a library of binaural beats, isochronic tones, and Zen-like soundscapes that can you can access.

Unfortunately, you only have access to the aforementioned Whistles, which are dictated by the app and the times and duration you set. However much of an oversight this may seem, these are audio glasses, so it isn’t a problem to combine them with a different app.

I use Atmosphere: Relaxing Sounds on my Android phone, and it works perfectly with the Fauna. Setting the glasses to play an isochronic tone at 6 Hertz (which reportedly stimulates creativity) certainly helped while I was writing this review. Which, coupled with the blue light filter, meant I was a very content writer.

The Fauna Are Fine But Need Work

I like the concept of the Fauna and I think that they have applications outside of being just worn and for listening to music, audiobooks, or taking calls. I think they have a nice product which certainly has an aesthetic appeal.

The speaker placement concerns me, as I feel you lose some bass sounds with the woofer pointing away from your ears. I’m also concerned about the degree of water resistance the IP rating offers. As said, don’t wear them in the rain and you don’t risk damaging them.

Granted, this is Fauna’s first bite at the apple. Hopefully, we’ll see some more products from the Fauna stables that really do offer something revolutionary in terms of sound, not just the method of delivering it.

Source: makeuseof.com