Google teams up with Samsonite to launch a Jacquard smart fabric-enabled backpack

That means you can touch the sleeve of your jacket or, in this case, the strap of your backpack, to trigger a handful of functions on your phone.

The number of gestures and what they can trigger is relatively limited, especially since you can only really assign three gestures: brush up, brush down and double-tap. You can assign standard media controls to these , drop a pin to save a place, hear the current time, ping your phone, hear directions to your next waypoint or arrival time or trigger the Google Assistant.Gestures can also trigger your phones shutter to take a selfie and theres a light function that lights up the Jacquard tags LED.Google says it can help you get noticed in a crowd or stay visible at night, but unless youre trying to be found in the darkest of caves, nobody will be able to see it.

As you can see, the main idea here is to let you access some of your phones functions while walking through the city with your headphones on.

At the time, that was the launch of Jacquard 2.0, with a couple of additional features and a new dongle that now works across products.