Google has just released a teaser video about three future art installation that will utilise their Jacquard technology. We first saw these nicely woven fabric capacitive sensors, essentially a textile tracker pad, in the Levi’s urban cycling jacket that could capture finger gestures to control your phone when cycling. More recently Google have worked with Adidas on an insole sensor for soccer boots. Mixing new technology, designers and artists always has interesting results and is to be encouraged, but there was strange comment, that they thought about getting the views of fashion designers but instead choose to go directly to some artists; this was posed as either or, but surely you could give it to fashion designers and artists. I would dearly love to have samples for my fashion design students to work with, as an additional component when creating their dynamic and sensing clothes. Other parts of Google are extremely open, such as Deepmind and the team producing TensorFlow, where they work extremely hard trying to convince you to adopt their technology. Of course sensing components are hardware and it may simply be that Google cannot effectively monetise it at the moment, they won’t be the first in this field to struggle with that.
Here is the video and looking forward to the final pieces…