Google is known for making products that are generally considered to be more or less game changing, but a lot of the time their announcements often don’t pan out into anything that can be considered as truly worthy of serious consideration and this is because of the fact that in several cases the prototypes of the proposed technology don’t function well enough or don’t meet the needs of the consumer well enough to become truly successful within the market.
Back in 2015, Google made one of its famous products, announcing a line of smart clothing that it referred to as Project Jacquard. The first product that was a part of this project was released two years later, namely the Levi’s Commuter Jacket. The jacket had quite a few cool features, including the ability to skip songs, adjust volume, answer and reject calls as well as a variety of others with a swipe of your hand over an area within the sleeve of the jacket. The electronic component of the clothing was no larger than a standard USB, but in spite of these pretty futuristic features the product did not sell well, and the next two years found Google being pretty quiet about the whole affair,
While this lead to a lot of people thinking that Project Jacquard had been scrapped, a recent announcement has revealed that Google never gave up on this project and has continued working on it. The electronic component has now been reduced to the size of an SD card, and the product that will soon be launched is the Saint Laurent Cite-e Backpack which has a slew of new features that Google is definitely going to market heavily.
The jacket’s hefty price tag that falls just short of a thousand dollars might be an obstacle however, although if the product is marketed appropriately it could very well sell like hotcakes.
Read next: Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber: How seven massive companies spend their billions
Back in 2015, Google made one of its famous products, announcing a line of smart clothing that it referred to as Project Jacquard. The first product that was a part of this project was released two years later, namely the Levi’s Commuter Jacket. The jacket had quite a few cool features, including the ability to skip songs, adjust volume, answer and reject calls as well as a variety of others with a swipe of your hand over an area within the sleeve of the jacket. The electronic component of the clothing was no larger than a standard USB, but in spite of these pretty futuristic features the product did not sell well, and the next two years found Google being pretty quiet about the whole affair,
While this lead to a lot of people thinking that Project Jacquard had been scrapped, a recent announcement has revealed that Google never gave up on this project and has continued working on it. The electronic component has now been reduced to the size of an SD card, and the product that will soon be launched is the Saint Laurent Cite-e Backpack which has a slew of new features that Google is definitely going to market heavily.
Today, we take the first step in fulfilling @GoogleATAP Director of Engineering @ipoupyrev’s vision at #TED2019 with the launch of @ysl’s Saint Laurent Cit-e Backpack.https://t.co/NnUtAr91GD pic.twitter.com/QoNCvhnt3G— Google ATAP (@GoogleATAP) September 14, 2019
The jacket’s hefty price tag that falls just short of a thousand dollars might be an obstacle however, although if the product is marketed appropriately it could very well sell like hotcakes.
Read next: Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber: How seven massive companies spend their billions
