Because inventing Google Glass wasn't impressive enough, the tech giant unveiled a pair of talking shoes at SXSW.
Calm down, Google Shoes are not going to be a thing. The experiment was designed to highlight its new advertising platform called Art, Copy and Code.
Google hacked a pair of Adidas sneakers to show "how you can use objects to tell stories on the web today," Aman Govil, head of the advertising team told ABC.
The shoes can tell the person wearing them what they are doing (or aren't doing) and can relay that information to their smartphone via a speaker in the tongue of the shoe.
The sneakers also house a small computer, accelerometer, pressure sensor, a gyroscope and Bluetooth.
The experiment is meant to work the way many other fitness gadgets do, relaying information about your activity and berating you when you're not being active enough.
"If you put what the shoe knows through an algorithmic logic engine, it can translate it into copy," Govil said. "Now if you give that copy to an interesting copy writer, you could give the shoe personality. One shoe could be the trash-talking shoe."
It's a novel idea but given that it needs a phone to function, there's probably no need for your shoes to be the gadgets that do the talking. All Google really demonstrated was that the sneakers could do what a smartphone is already capable of.
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