Google’s ATAP unit today debuted Project Jacquard, the group’s effort to develop the technology that could soon make interactive textiles not just a novelty, but something that the global fashion industry could adopt.
As ATAP’s Ivan Poupyrev noted, the question the group asked was how it could weave multi-touch textile sensors and how to weave interactive input devices. “We’ve done this before, people have done this, but we want to move beyond novelty,” he said. “We want to move beyond a single use case.”
The first thing the team had to do was to create a yarn that could be produced and woven into clothes on an industrial scale.
“We have to think about making interactive textiles at the scale of the global apparel and fashion industry.” he noted. “We can’t expect them to change just for us — even though we are Google. We have to adapt to the fashion industry.”
So the team went out and worked with partners to create a yarn that was conductive, but still resist the stresses of industrial garment manufacturing. Then, the next question becomes: how do you take the textile and connect it to electronics? The team realized that there was no need to weave the whole garment out of the new yarn — instead, they decided that it’s perfectly fine if only a small part of the garment is interactive. Then, you can have an area on your arm, for example, that you can interact with. ATAP built a chip that can take the signals from the yarn, which is organized in a set pattern, and then interpret the signals from the conductive yarns as people move their fingers over that area.
Google says it is building the whole pipeline to bring this technology to market and to create an ecosystem around it. The team is already working with creatives in the fashion industry. The first partner the company announced today is Levis.
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