ERIE, PA – October 9, 2019:
AcousticSheep LLC, the Erie-based company that invented the world’s most comfortable headphones for sleeping, branched out with its first art installation at Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern Pennsylvania and Penn State University’s Behrend campus for the “Art + Tech + Entrepreneur Experience.”
The company behind the globally successful SleepPhones® product line was chosen to provide their entrepreneurial experience and insight to local artists Tom Ferraro and Ed Grout. At their first meeting, they stumbled upon the idea of incorporating AcousticSheep’s new artificial intelligence initiative using infrared sensors and lights with a raspberry pi computer. The “Art + Tech + Entrepreneur Experience” aims to highlight the creative vision, inspiration, and struggles commonly shared among tech startups, and showcases The Looking Glass Project.
Jason Wolfe, co-founder and CTO of AcousticSheep worked with Ferraro and Grout to help in the creation of their installation, transforming their wall-sized interpretation of the entrepreneurial journey into an interactive experience that uses artificial intelligence to learn the preferences of installation viewers.
Wolfe says, “I love to create experiences. My background as a video game developer informs how this piece incorporates interactive technology with visual art, while highlighting my company’s transition to becoming both a hardware and software technology firm.”
About AcousticSheep
AcousticSheep was founded by Wei-Shin Lai and Jason Wolfe in 2007. Lai, a family physician, couldn’t get back to sleep after taking patient calls at night. Her husband Jason Wolfe suggested she listen to binaural beats in order to fall back asleep, but regular headphones and earbuds were uncomfortable. So they decided to design the world’s first headphones for sleeping. He soldered and she sewed the first “headphones in a headband” at their kitchen table and called them SleepPhones®.
