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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

> Jacquard enabled/You empowered

> Jacquard by Google transforms clothing. It’s an entirely new take on wearables that lets you do more than ever with the things that you love and wear every day. With Jacquard technology woven into the very fabric of your clothes, you can connect to your digital life instantly and effortlessly. With a literal brush of your cuff, you can navigate your life while living it.

I can't tell — is this some sort of late or early April Fool's joke? Or have I finally just become such an old fogey that I'm yelling at those goshdurn kids to quit sequencing their nanites on my lawn?

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This had better detail: https://www.blog.google/topics/atap/more-just-jacket-levis-c...

Basically, you can make various gestures on the jacket cuff to control things like playing/pausing music, having an incoming sms read aloud to you, etc.

Maybe useful if you're riding a bike, or other situations where interaction with a screen isn't practical?

But as the "tag snap" is detachable (so you can wash the jacket) it seems you can use it on its own, or with any other piece of clothing. I have a hard time understanding what is the advantage of this over any smartwatch.

You can't use it on any other garment, because the touch sensor is woven into the fabric.

At this point it's getting ridiculous. They should have made a detachable touch sensor instead. Why on Earth should I need to buy a particular piece of clothing to get a feature that's encompassed in 1% of it?

I understand MVPs, but if you're going to actually integrate stuff into fabric, make it something more advanced than a single touchpad.

Of the whole jacket or just the cuff?

Those scenarios are exactly where I still like using a pebble watch. At least for the music control scenarios I usually don't need to look at the screen.

The other scenarios still assume that I'm wearing earbuds - which arguably brings it's own risks (i.e. when riding a bicycle)

But why the focus on the jacquard threads? If it is just the cuff, why can't we just wear a bracelet or something similar? When I first say them introduce this, I thought there would be more tech built into the jacket itself, but it looks as if the cuff is the only important part.

The underlying tech could probably work on every part of the clothing. They probably found out that some gestures were awkward or unnatural in public, so the first iteration is pretty conservative. Touching your cuffs is pretty unsuspicious.

That's fair. So will we have to purchase a new jacket with a new iteration, or just a new snap-on attachment?

Even after going to Jacquard's website, I'm having a real hard time understanding what this is or what this does.

came here to say this. might have to pop into the store to check it out..

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