Wearable tech is all the rage right now, and Google unveiled its newest addition to that category late last week at the South by Southwest Festival.
"The talking shoe is an experiment in how you can use connected objects to tell stories on the web today," Aman Govil, lead of the advertising arts team, told ABC News.
The shoe is basically an Addidas sneaker embedded with Bluetooth technology, plus a computer and pressure sensor. It can tell what you're doing, or what you're not doing, then communicate what you should do be doing via a speaker wired through the tongue. As ABC News described it, the sneaker resembles a Reebok Pump without the squishy ball.
Govil joked that the shoe could talk a lot of smack, depending on how its information is translated into copy. But it could also be used to feed information through social media as it tracks movements in real-time.
The idea sounds interesting, but for many tech critics, it struck them as a marketing ploy designed to drum up interest in Google Glass. Watch Google's video to see for yourself:
[via ABC News]
