Project Jacquard hands-on: Google's crazy idea to make touchscreen clothing

[mmadhankumar]

Project Jacquard is the latest wacky yet perhaps world-changing innovation from Google's ATAP lab. The idea is simple: weave conductive yarns into textiles, that can make your clothes act like touchscreens.

Jacquard's touch-sensitive yarns use thin, metallic alloys combined with standard yarn from materials like cotton or silk – making smart yarn that's both touch-sensitive and strong enough to be woven into practically any piece of clothing.

Jacquard yarns can either have prominent stitching – isolated patterns that make it clear to the wearer which part of their shirt doubles as a controller – or woven seamlessly (basically invisibly) into the textile as a whole. And Google's goal is for the rest of the tech (Bluetooth radios and whatnot, so your pants can connect to your smartphone) to be as small as a button.

One example Google showed us at I/O was using touch-sensitive fabric to control Philips' Hue lights. In our Google I/O demo, a quick tap of the clothing turned the lights on and off, a swipe to the right scrolled through different color settings and swipes up and down changed the brightness.

At the very least, Project Jacquard is going to make for some of the strangest collaborations the tech world has ever seen. Together at last: Philips and Hanes, or Nest and Levi's? These are the wacky melting-pot ideas that can catch us all off-guard and – maybe, just maybe – change how we interact with the world.

Project page: Google

Project Jacquard hands-on: Google's crazy/brilliant idea to make touchscreen clothing

 

[shawl_who]

gosh !! soon we'll be electrified :skd