Here's how EPOS' BrainAdapt technology works

While we were out in Cologne for Gamescom 2023, we had the chance to catch up with EPOS to discuss a bunch of exciting new collaborations and technologies it is currently working on. One of these is known as BrainAdapt, with this being a process of refining EPOS' headsets to allow them to help your brain better process audio, and in the spirit of wanting to learn more about this incredible technology, we asked EPOS' head of communications, Michael Henning Jensen exactly how BrainAdapt works.

"Well, BrainAdapt for starters is a line of philosophies that we are using when developing our headsets. It's not one thing you can point at, but it's our way of approaching product developments.

"So as I mentioned before, we are owned by Demant. And they have 115 years of experience doing hearing aid solutions for people all around the world. And through them we actually have access to a big research centre called Eriksholm in the north of Denmark. And here we actually have the possibility to do a lot of research with professional scientists that look into how audio affects our brain.

"And so BrainAdapt is pretty much that we look into how can we create audio that puts the least pressure on your brain and actually gives you the most power for your brain to use on other stuff than analysing the audio that gets in, right? So last year we looked into how noise affects our brain, pretty much. And we did this profilometry analysis where we can actually see more noise makes your pupils expand because your brain is actually using a lot of effort in analysing what's going on. This year we added on to this research and we did a dual task research where we tried, where you're in a noisy environment just like the one we're standing in here, right? And you have been here for some days now, your brain gets so tired, you know, listening to all the noise all the time. But our brain is pretty good at actually tuning in and now the two of us are talking and we push everything away, right?

"So in a gaming environment when you sit and you have a lot of noise going on and you actually have to listen to your teammates giving you clues and telling you what to do. At the same time, many games, you got Counter-Strike, you got Rainbow Six, you also got to listen to the sound cues, you know. You get footsteps, you got grenades, you got stuff where things are going on. Doing all that, at the same time you also have to use the keyboard and got to press.

"And we did this dual task test and I was even in it myself. So we had a lot of background noise and then at one point you have to listen to a guy saying something and you have to be able to say it back afterwards. And that's pretty easy, it's not a problem. But then they added onto that at the same time he talked, you had to be able to push two arrows and point at the even number on a screen. And you know, you kind of stop, you know...

"...It's super difficult and it's actually, well, it's a little bit scary how easily we actually get affected by different things going on. And our white paper actually shows that just with this simple dual task, this was only to recognise some voice and point to arrows. And we actually saw that with bad audio where the noise cancellation, the passive noise dampening but also the difference between the noise and the sidetone, if that's not clear, you actually experience up to 300 milliseconds delay in your action time.

"So when you look at it from a gaming perspective, I mean people spend a lot of money on a monitor that goes from 4 milliseconds to 2 and a mouse from 3 to 2 milliseconds. That's really something here.

"So we did a white paper on this. So right now that is BrainAdapt. That is, I mean, it is that we are able to do some research and make some decisions based on that. Not saying that others can't do great headsets. That's not at all what we are trying to say. What we are trying to do is we really want to make it a science-based decision when creating our headsets. And that's what BrainAdapt is about."

Check out the full interview below for more information on EPOS' collaboration with Xbox and its current product line of headsets.