Project Jacquard

https://www.google.com/atap/project-jacquard/

by yla92 • 11 years ago

531 153 11 years ago

diminish• 11 years ago

I'm having a hard time to understand if it's some kind of joke or a true project. Could someone explain what's it all about? It's also interesting that the parent path https://www.google.com/atap redirects to project tango, https://www.google.com/atap/project-tango/

amaks• 11 years ago

Just watch the ATAP keynote on Google IO 2015 web site.

devindotcom• 11 years ago

It's a neat idea, and one I think people won't be able to appreciate until the killer app hits, possibly in fitness or high-end suits. As far as I'm concerned, it's just neat research being backed by Google with no obvious ulterior motive, and that works fine for me.

freyr2• 11 years ago

Google's business is targeted advertising. Its competitive advantage is knowing more about you than other advertisers.

Obviously, embedding clothing sensors could collect and deliver tremendous amounts of information about a person and their habits. It's aligned with Google's interests in an obvious way, and it would be naive to think this is lost on the decision makers at Google.

That's not to say it's bad. Google's ATAP program is modeled on DARPA, which has funded many military-oriented research programs that have delivered advancements that extend beyond military applications. Yet all DARPA programs have some obvious or non-obvious military value. I imagine ATAP works the same way, funding ambitious projects that have high potential value for Google's primary business, but also have potential for broader impact.

Navarr• 11 years ago

I'm not sure there's any sort of technology that does not somehow benefit Google's model.

Perhaps Encryption? Then why does ATAP have Project Vault?

btian• 11 years ago

That's bullshit and you know it.

Google is a large company with many businesses. How is Google Cloud Platform related to advertising? Nest? Liftware? Google Docs?

Fact is advertising is cyclical, and Google is aggressively diversifying away from it.

ngoel36• 11 years ago

A start for fitness is already here - it might not be the "killer app", but it has the potential to become so one day - liveathos.com

TeMPOraL9• 11 years ago

Here goes my dream of being the first to create a CPS suit from Continuum.

It's actually a weird feeling - on the one hand I love the progress we have; on the other hand, I feel sad that I can't get to be a part of it. It also seems to me that any cool idea I have tend to become a mass-market product before I can get around to start prototyping.

Yeah, I know, the real world. Real world sucks :(.

nine_k• 11 years ago

So you basically say you keep predicting ideas that large corps put to market? Enjoy your savviness; it could also help you get a nicer job.

Swizec• 11 years ago

I was convinced that self-driving convoy trucks where they just follow the leader were already a thing for like 20 years. Downright certain of it. It just seemed so obvious and relatively easy to implement.

Then bam, a few months ago, someone makes a big deal out of making that a reality. I was very confused.

oh_sigh• 11 years ago

If you are predicting these things, and people are doing mass market products before you can even prototype, it just means that people had this idea before you did, and it isn't that unique any more.

TeMPOraL9• 11 years ago

I'm painfully aware of that, and I didn't want to suggest that I have unique ideas. Honestly, I don't believe there are unique ideas anymore, not for the last 200-300 years. Even scientific breakthroughs tend to be independently developed in different places simultaneously.

I guess I'm just whining about the hardware world equivalent of "every idea I have has already been done ten times on the Internet by people smarter than me" sentiment, which - from what I learned over the years - is shared by many people here on HN.

atlih• 11 years ago

What do you mean "Here goes my dream". On the contrary, here's your chance to have that dream. Where there was little or none before.

ohitsdom• 11 years ago

If you're interested in this kind of thing, Becky Stern with Adafruit is a pretty great source for DIY wearables. Lots of tutorials and a regular Youtube series that keeps you updated on the latest products and tools.

sologoub3• 11 years ago

Reading this on the heels of talking with a colleague about (relatively near) future of TV advertising when marketers will know how many people are in the room (and possibly who these people are) and can deliver hyper-targetted ads, my initial reaction was "oh, crap... my couch will now know I'm sitting on it, for how long, etc... my t-shirt will know the last time I wore it and where..."

This future is inevitable and all the AMAZING use cases such advances bring, but I can't help but wonder how we can keep these operating for the "good" and not the "ugly" of tech and monetization.

javert3• 11 years ago

Don't use bad tech.

Some people will, but that's their loss.

As long as it's a free society, we'll each individually have the choice to stay away from bad tech.

Paying one of my local telco monopolies too much money to watch TV full of ads is already a losing value proposition for me, so I don't have cable TV.

I sure as hell am not going to get a TV that is connected to the Internet and has a microphone, much less shares information with advertisers. Same thing for a couch.

smacktoward2• 11 years ago

The problem arises when the bad tech crowds the good tech out of the market altogether.

I would like to have a smartphone that doesn't spy on me. I can't, because nobody makes one. So my personal preference doesn't matter; my only choice is between either accepting the spying, or not having a smartphone at all.

Now I get to look forward to enjoying this exact same dilemma when I buy furniture! Hooray.

manachar• 11 years ago

Don't use bad tech.

Unfortunately my choices are only a single data point in the market for consumer goods. The choices most other people make with their dollars far surpass any buying power I possess.

Certainly it's worth me doing my due diligence and try to purchase good tech, but at some point the market can and does remove my choices if more profit is made by bad tech.

You mention "smart" TVs. I recently tried to purchase a dumb TV with good resolution and sufficient ports to be used as I desired. I ended up buying a "smart" TV because the dumb TVs offered were all inferior visually. I wish you luck in avoiding a "smart" TV.

You see the same pressures in online video (YouTube ads are getting obnoxious), music streaming (I can't pay Songza to get rid of ads), etc.

In some ways this is a good and fine thing for the market, but at some point one has to realize the market is flooded with bad tech because it makes more money. And I've never known of a market that doesn't optimize for profit.

iamthepieman• 11 years ago

"Don't use bad tech"

That's a noble sentiment and I try to follow it as well.

Unfortunately the time is coming when I'll have the choice of being a Luddite or buying the bad tech because that's all there will be.

I already don't own a smart phone because I can't get one that doesn't have a secure or open source baseband processor.

I don't own a smart TV and by the time mine breaks down I'll probably have to go without a television as well.

The choice to go without rather than own and use invasive technology is not that big a deal when you haven't integrated it into your life yet. But giving things up that you've become reliant on is much harder.

Stallman saw this early on and built his life around it. I doubt many of us are willing to go that route.

TeMPOraL9• 11 years ago

I agree with other commenters that sometimes "bad tech" is the only tech remaining on the market, but I'd like to focus away from the invasive surveillance gizmos and point out that sometimes "bad tech" is just that - crappy equipment.

Smartphone market is flooded with bad tech. Yes, you can still buy decent ones - if you pay for the highest-end ones, but available devices have much less capability than they could theoretically have. For instance, were producers to drop sensor market segmentation tactics (you have a phone model A with sensors 1, 2, 5 and an alternative phone B with sensors 2, 4, 6) and equip at least the mid-and-high-end phones with all the sensors, we could treat smartphone as a sensoric platform and develop tools for bigger userbase.

But smartphones ain't that bad; the older technology, however, is. It's hard to buy decent, durable things nowadays - clothes, shoes, tools. Everything is pretty and colorful and has some cool new features, but nothing lasts more than a season of day-to-day use, even though things made decades ago can last a lifetime.

I used to think that maybe military has decent hardware, only to realize they're a money-making machine now, and vendors cheat on them even more.

So I guess the core observation is: as any market matures, it turns into a race to the bottom, and products quickly become as crap as possible but still good enough to make someone buy them.

Is there a solution? I don't know. Custom-made things is one option, but there's less and less businesses doing that for basic things, and I don't see how I could get a custom-made smartphone at a reasonable (< $10k) price.

sologoub3• 11 years ago

The underlying issue is who's data is this?

Is it the manufacturers because the device gathered it or is it the users because it describes the user?

Currently, from what I have seen, it's usually argued to be the former and not the latter. For there to be saner balance, users have to a say about how this data is used and owned. The "reasonable expectation to privacy" doctrine needs to evolve to match modern age.

michaelmior• 11 years ago

In case there's a chance someone doesn't know, the name comes from the inventor of the first programmable loom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Watching the results at the bottom I was thinking, this is the first programmable renderer.

TeMPOraL9• 11 years ago

Which leads to the question - does it have a demoscene?

mkempe5• 11 years ago

It really bothers me that Google hijacks Jacquard's name for their own project. In the future the Google search engine will bury Jacquard's innovation in /dev/Internet/dustbin

With decency, they could at a minimum have acknowledged his existence, creations, influence, and inspiration.

mkempe5• 11 years ago

Oh, downvoted! Love to you too.

Joseph Marie Jacquard was a genius and Google should not use his name without proper acknowledgement. Shame on Google, and on downvoters.

harperlee• 11 years ago

While I don't agree with mkempe, I don't see why this kind of messages should be downvoted... Choosing a name is a difficult task, and honoring someone with their name in a new creation is a noble gift, but the page does not explain why it was named like that, and so it remains elusive. Google could have take the time to explain it. But it's not like it's a shame, mkempe.

Also, if you could see who downvoted you, you could perhaps start a little war, so I don't think that such a conversation system would be better.

indrax• 11 years ago

This assumes google has an easily confused search engine.

msoad• 11 years ago

This is the missing part of Google Glass. For interacting with the Glass you don't have to touch the Glass itself. You can just perform gestures on your jeans.

ubersync• 11 years ago

I can't help but imagine how awkward that would be. If tilting your head repeatedly and talking to yourself was not enough, touching yourself all over the body will definitely make you look awkward!

TeMPOraL9• 11 years ago

If it's awkward, you've designed it wrong. Touch surfaces in your clothes can allow almost totally discreet operation. Just put them on your thigh, a little to the side, and you can operate them while standing or sitting without most people noticing.

MrBuddyCasino• 11 years ago

You mean, for those rare occasions when Google Glass just doesn't cut it to make you the nerdiest guy in the room, you can now get an extra-boost? Well, sign me up!

TeMPOraL9• 11 years ago

Like being a nerd is a bad thing :). Wear it as a badge of honour!

david-given• 11 years ago

Nah, that's too blatant. Have your shirt recognise small movements of your upper and lower arms and shoulders. With practice you should be able to enter reasonable-bandwidth data similar to on a cell phone keyboard without anyone noticing (and without having to use your hands).

...we'll call it 'learning to wear'.

xngzng• 11 years ago

Appears to be still cooking in the lab. Similar to Ara and also Glass. Sounds like a research project that needs not answer the business question of how to make money. IBM, Microsoft, Apple likes to keep theirs secretive. Google likes to showcase.

coherentpony• 11 years ago

Advertising. Wearing a specific brand of clothing will impact what your Google search results contain.

Edit: To the downvoters: Why? Am I wrong? Are you Google employees?

Dirlewanger• 11 years ago

Yup, that's a fucking scary-but-very-likely thought.

cromwellian2• 11 years ago

I am an employee, but I down voted it because it's dumb.

wldcordeiro• 11 years ago

I prefer their method, it's nice to see what their R&D looks like.

curun1r• 11 years ago

While I think there's a lot of possible ways that this can make money in the future, there are some that are just so obvious that it doesn't really compare to other research projects that are more of a departure. The ability to control our digital devices using input devices built into clothing and furniture is just obviously compelling.

Also, this isn't exactly new...Burton did something similar over a decade ago: (http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...)

sangnoir• 11 years ago

Microsoft Research[1] is hardly secretive for things that are cooking in the lab[2]

1. http://research.microsoft.com/

2. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/headlines/hyperlaps...

hharnisch• 11 years ago

This is really cool, but at first glance one of their images really freaked me out: https://www.google.com/atap/project-jacquard/static/img/maki...

Who's hand is that!

BinaryIdiot2• 11 years ago

Who's hand is that!

Someone's hand. It was someone's hand. Now it belongs to the fabric.

BinaryIdiot2• 11 years ago

I hadn't thought about conductive threads. What a neat idea. The applications could be really interesting here. I'm not sure what would be initially compelling but I'm interested in seeing what people come up with using this tech.

chralieboy• 11 years ago

This is amazing for card counting. Discreet swipes to add/remove count and double tap to have your phone/watch buzz the current count.

Maybe not the most ethical use of the tech, but sounds fun!

mtrpcic• 11 years ago

Yeah, this definitely takes "Android Wear" to the next level. Integrating pieces of your outfit into your phone/watch will allow for a lot of subtle little tweaks to every day life:

* Leaving work but forgot your keys? The electromagnetic sensor in your pocket will vibrate your phone to let you know the moment you step out of the office.

* No more "three tap check" for keys, wallet, phone. Every time you leave the house your clothes will check that for you.

* Two-factor auth is a lot easier when you can authenticate by wearing special underwear

* Feeling cold? Your clothes can probably detect that and adjust the thermostat in your car or home automatically (including heated seats!)

Lots of cool ideas, but these ideas have been floating around for a while now. Every piece of wearable clothing I've seen that had integrated electronics has been both bulky and gaudy. Maybe a concentrated focus like this will bring it to the next level.

downandout3• 11 years ago

I don't see a single one of these applications actually being possible with this. The thread enables touch sensitivity on clothing; nothing more. There are no temperature sensors, RFID chips, electromagnetic sensors etc.

It's interesting that even Google didn't post a single use case for it...I can't think of one off the top of my head either.

izzle49• 11 years ago

This only turns your clothes into an input device

simplemath• 11 years ago

"Prominent Vegas Casinos announce widespread deployment of near-field EMF jamming"

TeMPOraL9• 11 years ago

Won't help if you weave in touch surface, uC, power source and a vibration motor together. I'd be surprised if this hasn't been done before.

"In other news, Las Vegas Casinos become the primary buyer of backscatter X-ray machines."

downandout3• 11 years ago

Fwiw using a computer to gain an advantage over a casino is illegal in Nevada, New Jersey, and most other gambling jurisdictions worldwide. Also if you're reading this, chances are you are smart enough to be able to successfully employ any of the popular counting systems sans computer. However, because counting is both readily identifiable by casinos (who will bar you from playing blackjack) and delivers a relatively small edge, most professional gamblers have moved along to things like hole carding (finding weak dealers that expose their down card(s) as they deal, which is effective in a variety of games), ace tracking, exploiting the poorly designed side-bets that are popping up in all table games, and utilizing loss discounts that casinos give to most large players that can turn the odds in the player's favor when used with the right games and bets.

If you'd like to read about some of the more modern advantage plays available in casinos, check out http://apheat.net

neurotech1• 11 years ago

A neuroscience researcher (& personal friend) who works with high functioning autistic patients has said before that the best advantage in playing cards is to watch the other players for tells. These autistic patients are sometimes taught to watch for facial expressions as its not natural for them. This particular neuroscientist is very good at blackjack, but its not enjoyable for him.

The real advantage that advantage these high functioning autistic players have is that they usually don't show any emotion while playing blackjack. Also, These players are usually smart enough to know that "counting cards is stupid" and hate being compared to Rain Man.

mmanfrin• 11 years ago

I get annoyed with the business of Google on occasion -- I was very upset with the closure of Reader and IG, with choices they've made with Android; but I really appreciate the amount of unicorn ideas they push after.

shockzzz2• 11 years ago

WHAT.

shockzzz2• 11 years ago

y the downvtoz? dis proadukt iz amayzni

jedc• 11 years ago

I know the team at Knyttan (http://www.knyttan.com) which has awesome tech to enable industrial-size looms to do knitting on-demand.

If Jacquard fabric was used on Knyttan-enabled looms, anyone (designers, anyone else) could effectively print/knit one-off pieces of connected clothing.

The future is awesome. :)

smikhanov• 11 years ago

This is definitely not a joke. The guy in the video, Ivan Poupyrev (I'm super proud about graduating from the same university and department he has graduated from), is a world-class authority on UIs that are integrated into physical world.

His website lists lots of English-language materials about him, here's one interview with him in Russian, for Russian-speaking HNers: http://vozduh.afisha.ru/technology/vy-budete-zhit-vnutri-kom...

sebringj• 11 years ago

ah fuck i got rugburn on my finger again.

TD-Linux2• 11 years ago

The most obvious problem is that capacitive interfaces like this detect on both sides. Which means rejecting false touches from the clothing moving on your body is going to be very difficult - unless it's integrated into outerwear or something farther away.

avinashv• 11 years ago

Not at all. The fabric can be woven to specifically avoid this problem.

TD-Linux2• 11 years ago

How? The most common method I've seen is to put a ground plane behind the sense wires, but that would require 2 layers of fabric.

brianpgordon• 11 years ago

It's pretty funny that this hits HN the day after this did:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2015/05/27/what-heck-h...

It’s almost as if Page walked right into that corner office and flipped the switch marked “Fiscal Responsibility” from the “on” to the “off” position. At that point, Page abandoned Google’s second core philosophy, “It’s best to do one thing really, really well,” and started doing just about everything.

jbhatab• 11 years ago

Since when has google followed that philosophy? I always thought they were the mad scientist of tech companies and that was more Apple's cup of tea.

darkmighty• 11 years ago

Yea, the counterexample is pretty much all of their products. Gmail, Translate, pretty much every product was either acquired or created through internal experimentation afaik.

haberdasher• 11 years ago

"an artificial neural network for machine vision (whatever that is)" -- I think you should probably get your news/insights elsewhere...

copsarebastards• 11 years ago

Well, the problem is, they're not actually that good at search any more. I find stuff in my email now by grepping my email on my server easier than I do by searching in my GMail account. PageRank, their core technology, lowers results for things that have DMCA complaints. Even if their privacy settings weren't scary I'd be moving away from their services.

ngoldbaum• 11 years ago

Reminds me of the wearable computers in Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbow's End.

pcarbonn• 11 years ago

Best application of this tissue : a head cover with electrodes to do electro encephalograms and read your thoughts. What a powerful source of info to target ads...

maresca• 11 years ago

This would be great to integrate into the leg of my jeans so I can change my music while riding my motorcycle. I'll be following this project.

MyNameIsMK• 11 years ago

Dear Google,

Please stop. I do not want you or your technology in my life.

Thanks!

cpeterso• 11 years ago

How will these fabrics be disposed of? Can they be recycled?

abalone2• 11 years ago

Sage advice from Peter Molyneux:

"The bizarre thing is a huge amount of effort and time and money goes into researching the tech, like the Kinect tech and scanning the bodies, and there's always this one line that hardware manufacturers - whether it be Microsoft or anyone else - say and that's 'we can't wait to see what happens when it gets into the hands of developers.' Now if Apple had said that when they introduced the iPhone, I don't think we'd ever end up with the iPhone! What really should happen is that they put a similar amount of money into researching just awesome real world applications that you'll really use and that work robustly and smoothly and delightfully.

"They should spend as much money doing that rather than just on hardware tech and saying, 'Okay developers, we'll leave it to you.' If you look at the cases where technology has worked well - touch is one of those, and Wii Sports and motion control; Nintendo didn't introduce motion control until they had Wii Sports. You weren't just playing a few demos. I just hope that for the Holo stuff that they really choose an application and make that sing. That is what transforms a piece of tech from awe inspiring gadget that you try a few times and show off to friends into something that you use as part of your life, and that's really what we want technology to be. And that requires just an awesome amount of design to be put into the software, not just the hardware."

Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-01-22-molyneux-wa... via http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/01/23/mololens-molyneu...

GuiA• 11 years ago

Yep. It's easy to wrap early stage research in shiny PR and highly polished videos. Shipping a compelling product that incorporates the tech in a meaningful way is orders of magnitude harder.

Sadly, pushing the hip video is much easier and cheaper than building the products, and it makes you feel good about yourself. Kind of the corporate version of this psychological phenomenon: https://sivers.org/zipit

SoftwareMaven• 11 years ago

It's more than that. Finding a real-world, compelling, useful product based on a new technology is much harder than just developing the technology. This is, of course, obvious, because in both cases, you will have to develop the technology. For one, the project ends at that point; for the other, some of the most challenging work is just getting started.

If you are responsible for developing a new technology, you can claim success if you release something that works as advertised, even if nobody actually uses it ("it was ahead of its time", "naysayers poisoned the market", etc.). Since there is no way to tell ahead of release whether it will succeed in the market, your project and, by extension, your position within the company creating it, are secure. Much, if not all, of the blame can be externalized.

On the other hand, if your goal is to release a usable product, you've just massively increased your personal exposure. First, you have to become very opinionated because any product that tries to please everyone generally succeeds in pleasing nobody, so that means there will be people who hate it, often before it is even released. Second, it is usually possible to tell if a product is useful before it actually releases (if you aren't putting blinders on yourself), so you can find yourself in a position of failure before release, a failure that you cannot shift to anybody else.

Part of the reason the iPhone succeeded was because the person who, ultimately, was leading the project was the CEO. He wasn't worried about what his boss thought, so the entire team could focus on the complete application. But that was only part.

The other reason is that the product, the way the technology would be used, was part of a feedback loop that influenced the technology itself. The advantage of taking on all that risk of failure is that you end up with technology that is better, technology that is more suited for solving real problems.

bane4• 11 years ago

This is why Glass failed IMHO. Google spent a bunch of time on the hardware, but just wiffed it with obvious demo software. Then they just put it out in the world "hey developers, figure out what to do with this, because we can't be bothered".

Instead of a new computing paradigm, it turned into a very expensive head-mounted camera and not much else. Something GoPro had nailed at 1/10th the price point and without the creepy factor.

devsquid• 11 years ago

Glass was just a demo/research product, the tech isn't there yet to support something like Glass. Give it a few years.

lbotos• 11 years ago

I've also heard the idea of glass was about demoing AND getting the public conversation started about wearables so that when they have a product ready, the dialogue has been running.

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

Glass was a testbed that got overhyped thanks to executive meddling. I see no such thing with This, nor with Soli or Ara.

These are all ATAP projects revealed during a DEVELOPERS conference, so that there can be a collaboration in getting the software in place before general market release.

The overhype is why Google stopped doing device announcements at IO, because all the oversized tech blogs would grab the tickets just to be there to oh and ah at the new device, but not come up with new code and uses for the tech showed. Rather they would often pan what was clearly meant to be early prototypes as if they were the finished product.

Google, and to some degree Microsoft, is doing things the old PARC way. Create stuff, show it off, and if they can't find a use for it maybe someone else will.

Apple on the other hand sit on things until they have a use for it, and if they never find a use for it nobody else gets to see it and find a use for it.

In the end the PARC way of doing gave the world things like Ethernet and the GUI. Personally i prefer this way to the Apple "take my ball and go" approach.

But the press sadly love the coy ones, as they are so much easier to write clickbait about.

MAGZine• 11 years ago

I guess Molyneux is right in that no, Apple didn't do that--instead, they didn't say anything at all. The original iPhone had no app store, and no way of supporting external apps. Indeed, it was hackers and developers that took it and broke it into something that it was not.

Of course, I was pretty young at the time, so this might not be an accurate recount of events (or I may be mis-interpreting Molyneux's central point), but I think that giving a blank canvas to developers to play with can be just as interesting, especially when entering a new space--you just need to be ready for some turmoil along with the surprising uses of the tech.

abalone2• 11 years ago

His point is the original iPhone had its own polished apps out of the gate that demonstrated significant real world value: a much better touchscreen phone, iPod and mobile browser. They didn't just leave it up to 3rd party developers.

That's not to say developers can't add to that baseline, which obviously they have in a major, major way with the iPhone. His point is you have to make it useful out of the gate.

frik2• 11 years ago

Peter Molyneux is as always charming (similar to Steve Jobs) and wins the audience, and he used to have good game design visions. But Peter Molyneux is a shadow of his former self. Actually he was a studio head of a Microsoft Games studio Lionhead Studios and his studio had been sponsored by Microsoft to actually work on Kinect software prototypes known as "Project Milo" and with demonstrations at E3, at TED. At the end the project failed because the implementation was sub-par and they had to cut almost every feature that was in the original vision. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Milo

Peter Molyneux tanked his latest two game products in a big awful away - the community isn't happy at all: "Curiosity" and "Godus" are in a gray area that some may label as scam. he recently left 22Cans, the studio of his latest two projects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux (little outdated info) , http://www.4players.de/4players.php/spielinfonews/Allgemein/... , http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2476895,00.asp , http://www.gamespot.com/articles/peter-molyneux-protege-quit... , http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/05/28/peter-monlyneuxs-22ca... , http://www.gamespot.com/articles/curiosity-winner-once-promi...

So maybe he begins a new era that resume his glory era of the 1990s Bullfrog games that one has in mind when one hear his name.

Sven72• 11 years ago

I don't see how all this unnecessary info takes anything away from the point he made.

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

Must say that the Lionhead games, while big in what they claim to be doing, fall flat from a gaming perspective compared to the Bullfrog games Molyneux designed (never mind that quite a few big name Bullfrog games didn't have him involved at all).

All in all i find myself thinking that Jobs early on had Woz (hell, in a sense Jobs piggy backed on Woz).

And similarly in the gaming world there was ID software and the combo of Carmack and Romero.

I kinda wonders who it was in the background at Bullfrog that did the grunt work that made Molyneux look good.

Avshalom• 11 years ago

Meh. I mean the iPhone was argueably revolutionary in as much as it was the device that finally pushed consumers into smart phones but on the other hand we all knew what you did with a smart phone by then.

We didn't really know what to do with the kinect (beyond ripping off Wii games). The Wii vs kinect is a bit disingenuous, the Wii was a whole new platform which needed launch titles of course Nintendo was going to have games ready. Kinect was 'just' a new peripheral.

frade33• 11 years ago

Any tech that is invented, and implanted on human beings, without studying the humans themselves. is bound to fail. Humans are smart mammals and they do appreciate anything that's smart, however they didn't come from a fancy space ship as google has established. they were born on the earth. that is full of colors, breeze, green fields.

on a serious note, what happened to Google Glass??

regardless of downvotes, I am convinced that all these 'efforts' are solely aimed to stay relevant, Tech is changing at a pace that no one could have predicted. Even Apple is paranoid. Who had thought iphone 6+++?? I don't mean it's uncool. But just see how things are happening fast and quick. It's hard to catch up.

Google has more failures in recent years than any other company, because either they were too late to the party or too early. i.e Google Plus / Google Glass etc etc.

iPhone was not 'too early' it was just in time. that's why it was a major hit. Give me something that I would start using today(). If it's practical and useful it is gonna be hit. Else beyond the headlines it would only be biting the dust in the labs.... a privilege that until now, solely belonged to Microsoft

dazzla• 11 years ago

You need a lot of bad/unsuccessful ideas to find the good/successful ones.

dingdingdang• 11 years ago

OK, but what exactly does this achieve? Bad to worse touch sensitivity on my sleeves? Why? I wish they could have come up with at least one genuine show-stopper application to get people excited about this tech. Reading through this thread the only semi-reasonable application is surreptitious counting of cards.. and even that is useless as cleanly pointed out by the most upvoted comment-on-comment by downandout.

Kalium2• 11 years ago

I'm left thinking that the point of this announcement is to get designers thinking about possible applications.

IanCal2• 11 years ago

I'm a little surprised at the negativity in this thread. They've announced flexible, soft touch interfaces which can be produced at scale using existing production methods. Isn't that at least really cool? Do you not think there are places this could be used?

I don't know if I can think of many "showstoppers" but is it really that hard to imagine places where a new input device could be used?

Soft, invisible, cheap (?) touch sensors that are flexible and easy to work with.

Things I'd use this for / would like to play around with:

1. Touchpad on the side of my sofa, so I can use gestures to control TV and media. 2. Touchpad on the side of my headboard in the same material as the rest with a subtle marking on which I can control / dim my lights. Similar things for controlling alarms. 3. Improving children's toys that require buttons now but do so by having hard things surrounded by some padding. I imagine "tickle me elmo" that was able to say "you're tickling my feet!" would be popular. 4. Would this detect my feet through socks? Run a bunch through my carpets, I'm sure I can do some fun stuff with home automation with that by knowing which room I'm currently in. Similarly for that, I'd like to track some of my habits, how long do I actually spend just sitting on the sofa or how often do I really get up from my desk and go somewhere else? 5. Make some board games. Fabric + some metal pieces, all the complex logic could sit on your phone. 6. Better sleep tracking? Do I curl into a ball, starfish, keep rolling about a lot?

Those are mostly just things I'd like to do at home. What about interfaces where you want to present something to other people? I've seen touchscreens at restaurants/bars, would a soft less delicate one work well?

To be honest, I think that you could make an absolute killing selling a t-shirt that had a touch sensitive star-trek looking badge that answers the phone. Not world changing, but I can definitely see that this could be used.

IanCal2• 11 years ago

Ah damn, missed the edit window and forgot this wasn't markdown.

Formatting fix:

1. Touchpad on the side of my sofa, so I can use gestures to control TV and media.

2. Touchpad on the side of my headboard in the same material as the rest with a subtle marking on which I can control / dim my lights. Similar things for controlling alarms.

3. Improving children's toys that require buttons now but do so by having hard things surrounded by some padding. I imagine "tickle me elmo" that was able to say "you're tickling my feet!" would be popular.

4. Would this detect my feet through socks? Run a bunch through my carpets, I'm sure I can do some fun stuff with home automation with that by knowing which room I'm currently in. Similarly for that, I'd like to track some of my habits, how long do I actually spend just sitting on the sofa or how often do I really get up from my desk and go somewhere else?

5. Make some board games. Fabric + some metal pieces, all the complex logic could sit on your phone.

6. Better sleep tracking? Do I curl into a ball, starfish, keep rolling about a lot?

meerita• 11 years ago

I'm so amazed with the new wave of projects Google are working on. Definetively, the sensation I had about Apple as a innovation company has changed once I seen these new projects. This is innovation, this is a nice approach to future and not iphone and iwatch iterations.

ryandrake• 11 years ago

This is more invention than innovation.

joefkelley• 11 years ago

If nothing else, this is immediately useful to the sport of fencing.

If you're not aware, competitive fencers already wear metallic jackets to detect when one has been hit by the other's weapon. If this could make them cheaper/lighter/more durable/more accurate or improve them in any way, that would be pretty cool. I'm guessing you could even track the specific place that they hit.

angersock• 11 years ago

Fencing electronics are, at least last I looked, suuuuuper janky.

jamesrcole• 11 years ago

I wonder if this could be used to log a person's activities?

If it was in their clothing and if movements of peoples' limbs -- brushing against the fabric -- generated data that could be used to determine what they're doing.

E.g. 80% chance they're currently sitting typing at the computer. Or at another moment, that they're probably washing some dishes. Or what particular task a factory worker is working on.

kjax• 11 years ago

After reading about this, I realized that as always, battery tech might become somewhat of an issue for this application. However, nearly all of us have a cellphone that has a wireless charging mechanism; what if we were able to reverse that mechanism, so that something like a pant pocket was able to collect a small amount of energy from this process? Easier still, phones could be manufactured with small copper contacts on the back to do this the old-fashioned way. I realize that phone batteries are quite terrible in many cases, but this could change... or perhaps the process could be optimized to use such an irrelevant amount of energy required to keep the garment charged?

natch2• 11 years ago

It's interesting if you look at this from Google's perspective, as a data collection project.

genericone• 11 years ago

Are you implying they want to do big data on how people touch themselves? or because, therefore, implication, ads?

natch2• 11 years ago

I was thinking more about how people move, and how the motion capture data would be amazing for many purposes such as person identification, activity identification, learning what cultures/sports/injuries/ailments/etc. correlate with what styles of motion, learning "tells," as in poker, about how people are feeling... the list of applications of this data could go on for quite a while. It also could feed into research on some styles of robot locomotion.

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

For people wondering about use cases, a friend of mine has been working in this area for a decade and is now starting to get traction in the fashion industry: http://www.lara-grant.com/

iandanforth• 11 years ago

Along with a collaborator from MIT,(1) I helped create rSkin, a multi-touch stretchable textile sensor for robotics.(2)

Here are some really interesting things I learned about e-textiles during my project

- The hard/soft interface is really hard.

At some point you need to interface with electronics and in many cases this will be a failure point. Also, normal electrical contact methods like soldering just don't work.

- Stretch is really hard.

Most of the fabrics shown don't look like they have much stretch, but I wanted something that could wrap around robot joints. Turns out that calibrating a sensor for this task is very hard to model. Even without stretch calibrating and maintaining calibration can be hard.

- Metal oxidizes

I'm hoping Google has taken care of this but many of the thread types I had at the time were silver based and would degrade (become much more resistive) over just a few months.

- Getting high resolution sensors is tricky.

Getting a ton of conductive threads wired up in a matrix means you're trying to do lots and lots of hard/soft interfaces. Automating bringing all those threads from one grid direction into a tight layout to match with a board or other metal conductor will be a very interesting manufacturing challenge.

I'm surprised and excited to see Google take this on as I still feel there is huge potential for e-textiles in softer and more sensitive robotics.

(1) Hannah Perner-Wilson (who did all the hard work)

(2) Check out the instructable (http://www.instructables.com/id/rSkin-Open-Source-Robot-Skin...)

msutherl2• 11 years ago

The hard/soft boundary is indeed very difficult, especially when you have bundles of leads in all directions!

I did some work with stick-on stretch conductive textiles, both silver and polymer-based (Eeonyx), and something I always wished I'd had was a high bit-depth A/D converter so that I could work with a ton of headroom to account for the inevitable swings due to environmental changes, degradation, etc. in software.

I'd love to see someone produce a 16bit+ A/D converter front-end for Arduino or something. I actually purchased all the parts for wiring up one of these, but didn't have time to finish: http://www.linear.com/product/LTC2444. Looks like some people have been working on it: http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/07/02/interfacing-the-lt....

shkesar• 11 years ago

Wait! What all did the Jackie Chan's Tuxedo do?

styts• 11 years ago

I imagine it would be great to sit through my commute, while typing something on my knees, with the touchscreen keyboard integrated into the fabric of my trousers.

louithethrid• 11 years ago

If there is one thing that is in for a softrapture with augmented reality, its fashion. The designers still will be there- but i can imagine a world were visuals and physical reality are completely disjunct.

jedanbik• 11 years ago

Outside of a fashion week couture fashion tech concept house like Anrealage[1], what will this do for us? Project Jacquard strikes me as a solution to a problem, but I can't think of a single problem it solves. A smart watch tells time, streamlines notifications, and maybe keeps me in shape, but this? What will this do for me?

[1] http://www.kaltblut-magazine.com/anrealage-aw15-16/

lnanek2• 11 years ago

If your display is in your contact lens, how are you going to dismiss a notification or reject a phone call? Well maybe you just have to swipe the right way on your jacket sleeve like they did at the key note.

Project Jacquard

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