What if you could just put on a mask and gain superman senses, like enhanced hearing or augmented sight? Students at the Royal College of Art in London have created two such masks. The project is named Eidos, and is manned by Tim Bouckley, Millie Clive-Smith, Mi Eun Kim and Yuta Sugawara.

The students designed two different prototype masks, one offering enhanced hearing and the other enhanced sight.

“We are used to controlling the world around us to find the settings that suit us best. But while technology advances to aid this, our physical bodies remain the same. What if we had the same control over our senses? If we could adjust them in real time, what experiences would this make possible.”

The first mask covers the bottom half of a person’s head including the user’s ears, mouth and nose and thanks to a microphone it delivers a single stream of audio even in a noisy environment. If that doesn’t make sense don’t worry, I’m going to offer an example. The mask seems like it was a gadget pulled straight out of a James Bond flick. While wearing the mask, you can target a single person and clearly hear their voice, meanwhile the surrounding ambience is drowned out.

The second mask is worn over the user’s eyes. Somewhat like Google Glass, it will capture video in first person and then transmit that content to a remote computer. The data is altered to include a new filter of sorts, and then transmitted back to the device. With the sight mask, you can see movement patterns similar to object trails in long exposure photography.

This certainly comes at an interesting time, a time when wearable tech is on the rise. It’s like something out of a dream, except it’s not a dream- this is very real indeed. Someday we may be able to wear distinct technology that allows us to enhance our senses and become superhuman. Imagine if these features were implemented into Google Glass? The sheer potential is incredible!

I’ve included a demo video of the masks below, it definitely makes for an interesting watch- check it out!

[via Tim Bouckley, Mashable]