This is a serious problem for many Australians, who end up with boxes and boxes of mismatched socks. Every year we have been resigned to add new orphans to the box… until today.
We’re teaming up with retailers across Australia to launch a new range of Searchable Socks — to organise the world’s undergarments and make them universally findable.
These new bluetooth-enabled socks are fitted with thin LTE beacons that wrap around the top of your lower calf, just like the coloured stripes you’d see on traditional socks. If you can’t find one sock, you can press the beacon on its pair and let the Google Search app on your phone pinpoint its whereabouts. The missing sock will then sing this song to help you find it.
We’ve been working hard to make this technology small and seamless (literally). You won’t even notice the technology is there.
For the fashion-conscious, the socks are available in blue, red, yellow, and green. You can also purchase a pure white version from the Google Store that allows the beacon strip to camouflage with the rest of the sock.
We’ll be open-sourcing the technology later this year, with the idea of creating an entire ecosystem of developers and sock makers. Old socks can also be retrofitted with this same technology, so that they never go missing again either. Simply attach a Searchable beacon strip to each sock and you’re ready to walk.
Posted by Paula Legg, Searchable Socks Product Manager, Google Australia and New Zealand