Google innovates in something as basic as cables. Their engineers have been experimenting and have one that is capable of detecting finger contact. Thanks to this, it is capable of recognizing different gestures and translating them into actions that could be very useful in our daily use of a multitude of devices such as mobile phones or smart speakers, among many others.
Google's smart cable
We have spent years betting on a wireless world, where cables are no longer that problem that always ends with all kinds of trouble. Hence, for example, the headphone jack has disappeared from the vast majority of mobile phones, the price of wireless headphones It has gone down so much and that wireless charging is starting to be something by default in any device regardless of whether it is high-end or not.
For all this is why Google's new proposal surprises so much. Most wanting to get rid of cables and they go and get a new cable with a very particular characteristic: they are interactive.
What does this mean that they are interactive? Well, we'll explain it to you quickly. Through what they call Helical Sensing Matrix or HSM (helical matrix), this cable is capable of offering gesture recognition that would allow us control similar to what you can do with hands-free headphones that you already have at home.
That is to say, if with this hands-free you can change the volume and depending on how you press it, two or three presses, skip the song or return to the start, pick up or hang up a call, etc., with this cable you would do the same. The difference is that these touches and gestures would be done on any part of the cable.
To achieve this, the company has used this helical matrix design and combined optical fibers with passive threads to have the ability to detect a single touch, double touch and even turning to one side or the other. Then, each of these gestures is translated into a specific action, as you can see in the following video.
Striking? The truth is that yes, just like that visual information that the optical fiber included in the cable is also capable of giving by lighting up in different colors.
A proposal with a future beyond the smartphone
As you can imagine, although the examples shown are basic to make it easier for anyone to understand their possibilities, the truth is that it is even easier to see what types of uses beyond the mobile phone could have and there are many.
Having it as a control system for smart speakers is linked to the previous one, but it is still more striking and practical. Another interesting use would be with lamps. Imagine simply touching the cord to turn it on and twisting it to one side or the other to adjust the intensity. Virtually any type of interaction could be brought to this control system.
Therefore, although the smartphone ends up being the device that I use the least, the connected home could really get a lot out of it to such a technology. But we will have to wait, because at the moment this is neither more nor less than another experiment that Google engineers are working on.