The Levi smart jacket featuring Google’s Project Jacquard technology is coming later this year
Google and Levi first announced their plans to work on smart garments nearly two years ago, and those efforts have at last come to fruition in the form of the Levi Commuter Trucker smart jacket.
Image Source: Levi
An actual product featuring Google’s Project Jacquard technology will finally be available to buy later this year. Google and Levi first announced their plans to work on smart garments nearly two years ago, and those efforts have come to fruition in the form of the Levi Commuter Trucker smart jacket, which was first announced last year.
Jacquard owes its existence to Google’s Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP) group, and it uses conductive fabric that can be embedded into regular cloth to turn segments of clothing into gesture-sensitive areas that can send commands to your smartphone.
This includes things like pausing or skipping a song, adjusting your music volume, or even answering a phone call. All this is done via finger swipes on the jacket’s left cuff, which connects via Bluetooth to your phone.
The conductive area comprises 15 threads on the left sleeve, and you can customize what you want each gesture to do in the Project Jacquard Android app. According to Levi, it is also working to add support for more gestures later on.
The smart jacket will cost US$350 when it goes on sale in the later part of the year. It was originally slated for a spring 2017 launch, but Levi and Google announced at the SXSW festival that they were now aiming for a fall release, which puts it sometime around late September.
Source: Levi
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