This means that your favourite items whether it be a jacket, a pair of shoes or a bag, will keep you connected to your digital life in new, seamless ways. Google found ways to provide unique access to the digital world through items that aren’t normally considered to be technology, by starting with raw materials, such as yarns and textiles. That’s because our focus has always been to add a new layer of connectivity and interactivity to things you already know, love, and use every day.” Google reports that “From the very first touch, Jacquard feels familiar. This technology streamlines the way you access services and information by putting it right into the materials you already wear and use.
The first full scale digital platform created for smart clothing, ‘Jacquard’.
The news comes amongst a series of new announcements, starting with the updates to Google ATAP’s Project, Jacquard technology. It will be interesting seeing textile and plastics controls come out as described in these patents.Smart clothing is expected to become $1 billion industry by 2020, a new study has revealed. My father would have gotten a kick out of seeing a plastics extruder in a Google Patent (I know I did.) You can swipe up on textile controllers with Project Jacquard An Extruder showing plastics materials being heated up to send to a mold The patent shows off plastic molder devices with controls built into them. A two finger touch on the controller is also possible in Project Jacquard.
A double tap on the controller is possible. Here is a look at the textile controller. The drawings that accompanied this Project Jacquard patent were interesting because they showed off how gestures used on controls might be used: In one or more implementations, the interactive textiles may be integrated within various hard objects, such as by injection molding the interactive textile into a plastic cup, a hard casing of a smartphone, and so forth.
For example, the interactive textiles may aid users in controlling volume on a stereo, pausing a movie playing on a television, or selecting a web page on a desktop computer.ĭue to the flexibility of textiles, the interactive textile may be easily integrated within flexible objects, such as clothing, handbags, fabric casings, hats, and so forth. The interactive textile can process the touch-input to generate touch data to control various remote devices. An interactive textile includes a grid of conductive thread woven into the interactive textile to form a capacitive touch sensor configured to detect touch input. This document describes interactive textiles. After exposing the conductive wires in the window of the interactive textile, an electronic component (e.g., a flexible circuit board) is attached to the exposed conductive wire of the conductive thread in the window of the interactive textile. The conductive thread includes a conductive wire (e.g., a copper wire) that that is twisted, braided, or wrapped with one or more flexible threads (e.g., polyester or cotton threads).Ī fabric stripping process is applied to the interactive textile to strip away the interactive textile and the flexible threads to expose the conductive wire in a window of the interactive textile. In various implementations, an interactive textile that includes conductive thread woven into the interactive textile is received. This document describes techniques and apparatuses for attaching electronic components to interactive textiles. Inventors: Karen Elizabeth Robinson, Nan-Wei Gong, Mustafa Emre Karagozler, Ivan Poupyrev I was curious to find patents related to Google’s Project Jacquard, so I went to the USPTO website and searched, and a couple came up.Īttaching Electronic Components to Interactive Textiles This morning I tweeted an article I saw in the Sun, from the UK that was kind of interesting: Seating Plan Google’s creating touch-sensitive car seats that will switch on air-con, sat-nav and change music with a BUM WIGGLE
I was surprised to see a web page from Levi’s showing a joint project from Google and Levis on their Project Jacquard. Outside of search efforts from Google, but it is interesting seeing what else they may get involved in since that is beginning to cover a wider and wider range of things, from self-driving cars to glucose analyzing contact lenses. He would have loved seeing what is going on at Google these days and the hardware they are working on developing, focusing on building controls into textiles and plastics.
I remember my father building some innovative plastic blow molding machines where he added a central processing control device to the machines to change all adjustable controls from one place.