Google and Levi Strauss have partnered to make a “smart jacket”, and the end result is exactly as good as you’d expect from a collaboration between the companies that brought you a set of glasses people actively hated and a hideous touch-sensitive watch (that one was Levi’s).
The apparel, a $350 denim jacket branded as “Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket with Jacquard by Google”, is the first product of a two-year-long collaboration between the two firms that started back in May 2015 with the intention of making a pair of “smart jeans”. The idea was to use a newly designed conductive fabric to allow the garment to send data and power without the need for wires.
Since then, the plan has clearly changed, but the basis remains the same: the jacquard fabric is integrated into the jacket, and allows the smart features to work.
L: Google co-founder Sergey Brin wears Google Glass in 2013; R: a Levi’s smartwatch of the same vintage. Photograph: Seth Wenig/Levi's/AP
The downside is those smart features … aren’t very smart. The jacket includes a “smart tag”, which is basically a smartwatch without the watch: it lights up in various colours, vibrates when receiving notifications, can be tapped to issue commands, and is the hub of the jacket. But the sleeve itself is also touch sensitive. Simply stroke your arm to control your smartphone – that’s the fancy Jacquard fabric in action.
Oddly, all of the jacket’s features seem to require not only having your smartphone with you and paired with it, but also having headphones on. Headphones, of course, can themselves have a variety of gesture-based controls, but are easier to wear in the summer, and without risking double denim when you want to wear jeans.
One downside of the jean jacket does reveal why Levi’s and Google decided to switch from trousers to coats: the fabric can only survive being washed 10 times. After that, the fancy gestures go kaput.
Despite its bulky name, Levi’s with Jacquard by Google actually manages to leave out the wing of the tech firm responsible for the fabric: Google’s Atap (Advanced Technology and Projects) division, the last remaining part of Motorola after Google bought, then sold, the phone manufacturer.
Atap hasn’t had the best of luck in producing things that actually make it to market: it led the development of Project Tango, an AR-focused Android device which was innovative in 2015 but only shipped in a tiny number consumer devices before being gazumped by an entirely unrelated Android AR system; and Project Ara, an attempt to build a modular smartphone which was eventually cancelled in 2016.