Dyson Zone Air Purifier Noise Cancelling Headphones, When April Fool Becomes Profitable

On March 31st Dyson announced the Dyson Zone wearable air purifier.  The technology that goes into these apparently is an incorporation of a Dyson’s air purifier into a pair of headphones, with a front plate blowing air into the wearers face, and the headphones silencing the noise of the purifier, and the outside world.

The response from new and old media has been largely ridicule.  The campaign featuring Jake Dyson has been laughed at, with the designer and engineer posing on the London tube being observed as a demonstration of how this would never be, as the models in the campaign show, ignored.  And others variously critiquing the company as “out of touch”.

The timing would make this pretty obviously an April Fools joke.  However 2 days on Dyson, who have created a special section on the site, with a short 2 minute promotional video where Dyson engineers and designers discuss the device, refuse to admit this.  This presents an interesting conundrum.  The acting by the Dyson engineers is so obviously false, and the statements they deliver so clearly vague and nebulous, while still in keeping with the type of marketing Dyson may do, what’s the reason for them refusing to come clean on the joke?  It’s been a few days now, it’s not funny anymore guys, come on!

We have a theory.  Two theories in fact.  Possibility one is, the response has been so overwhelmingly negative outside spambot shillmeisters that Dyson, who thought this was a jolly funny joke, got a bit insulted.  So rather then taking the site down and saying “gotcha”, they are pretending it was a real product, and will quietly shelve it in 6 months due to “design and engineering obstacles”.

Option 2, we think a more likely one, is they got so much interest in the product from potential buyers they thought to themselves, “hang on, we could make some money here guys”.

Whatever the case, we will never accept that this product was a genuine design effort five years in the making.  First from a design perspective it’s not practical to put on and take off.  Second the noise of a purifier running would be so deafening that it would invalidate any noise cancelling, not to mention with noise cancelling off you may damage your ears with long period of usage.  Third the prototypes, video, and entire manner this is presented is below Dysons standard to such a degree it’s clearly something they whacked together in a month or so because they thought it was funny (initially).

We look forward to seeing the outcome of this, now overly long, April Fools joke.