Google confirms prototyping fabric that can control media playback with pinching or twisting it

The fabric can be woven into the cord of your headphone or speaker and can control the volume (for instance) by twisting it, pinch to pause/play and double pinch to skip tracks.

This fabric includes capacitive characteristics that can let a user touch it to control the connected device. (Pixabay)

A scalable interactive E-textile architecture with embedded touch sensing, gesture recognition and visual feedback. (Google)

news

A scalable interactive E-textile architecture with embedded touch sensing, gesture recognition and visual feedback. (Google)

Google states that this tech is being currently tested with headphone wires, hoodie drawstrings and speaker cord.

“A key insight is that the two axial columns in an HSM that share a common set of electrodes (and color in the diagram of the flattened matrix) are 180-degree opposite each other. Thus, pinching and rolling the cord activates a set of electrodes and allows us to track relative motion across these columns. Rotation detection identifies the current phase with respect to the set of time-varying sinusoidal signals that are offset by 90-degree. The braid allows the user to initiate rotation anywhere, and is scalable with a small set of electrodes,” states the blog post.