Imagine clothing with tech embedded into the fabric to give users control of their phones using simple gestures, shoes connecting physical football and digital gaming or a backpack that makes travel more seamless.
The Levi’s® Trucker Jacket, Adidas GMR and Konnect-i Backpack Samsonite® can do just that. And guess, who’s behind this smart wearable tech? It’s us, Mobica!
Our role
Mobica supplied Google with Machine Learning engineers to work on the unique Google ATAP’s Jacquard technology. The technology integrates digital experiences directly into wearable products using a Jacquard Tag and a touch sensor that acts as a remote for calls, music, and more by recognising people’s gestures.
Jacquard-enabled products
Watch these videos to see how smart clothing works:
Trucker Jacket Levi’s®
Adidas GMR
Konnect-i Backpack Samsonite®
Przemek Pospieszny, Technical Manager (TPM), explains our role
“The touch-sensitive strap controls a connected smartphone with four gestures: swipe up, swipe down, double tap, and covering it up. Our job was to build a Machine Learning model that would make the gestures responsive. As a result users can make use of features such as swiping over the Levi’s® Trucker Jacket cuff to issue commands to the phone.
Our responsibility included the entire end-to-end process. This entailed designing, training, and evaluating these ML models. Additionally, a lot of work also went into data collection involving human movement biomechanics. Once the model was ready, our job was to resize it to fit into a small tag, which meant making it run on a small processor.
One of the key considerations was that we couldn’t allow a random gesture to operate the phone, therefore we worked tirelessly to eliminate all false positives. Even when the product was on the market we were still involved in maintaining these models and upgrading them to make them work even smarter.”
Everything around you can become a computer
Google’s ATAP team is led by Ivan Poupyrev, a technology leader, scientist and designer working at the cutting edge of interactive technologies.
To learn more about Ivan’s awesome ideas, watch this TED Talk, in which he lays out his vision for ambient computing, i.e. a physical world deeply connected to the internet.
Ivan Poupyrev: Everything around you can become a computer | TED Talk