Hoodies prove technology is just pulling all the strings

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Apparently, it’s no longer effortless enough to just take your little mobile phone from your pocket to answer a call, or to open your emails with the swipe of a thumb; now it appears that’s too much like hard work.

Instead Google are working on a short-cut.

This – and I kid you not – might be to empower the string on your hoodie to control your electronic devices so you no longer even have to take your hands out of your pockets.

Actually, you might still have to use one of your hands because this string would control your device by you, the owner and wearer, pinching, patting, grabbing, sliding or flicking it.

That’s because this fabric cord uses what Google calls a ‘helical sensing matrix’ that responds to hand commands.

The explanation for all this is taken straight from the report in the Times because frankly I’ve no idea what it means – nor do I know why we need it.

Instead of using three or more material strands to form this infamous hoodie string, Google ‘interwove electrically conductive yarns’.

So, when someone performs an action such as pinching it, the yarns transmit signals that tell a phone to perform an assigned task – because the cord is ‘interlaced with fibre-optic strands that display colour when touched’.

Google produced a video that allowed its researchers to show a cord that played music when pinched, changed the volume when twisted, switched tracks when pulled and turned it off when patted.

All of the things us old fogeys thought as cutting-edge with a mobile phone. But just how lethargic do you actually have to be to feel the need for a short-cut when using your phone?

It’s not like phones used to be; mounted on a wall or anchored to a small table in the hallway. Now, your phone fits snugly into your pocket or hand, and has sold itself the world over for its simplicity and mobility.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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