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Google, H&M wants your phone to design your next dress
8 Feb 2017
While our favourite garments aren't as unique as we believe them to be, how we combine these pieces defines our individual style. But can style be determined by the likes of technology? That's what Google and H&M hope to discover.
Image via Memeburn
The Android app, designed by both Mountain View and H&M’s Ivyrevel fashion house, wants to use your daily habits to design a bespoke dress for your needs.
At the heart of the app is Google’s Awareness API, which “enables apps to be aware of all aspects of a user’s environment” through a device’s available sensors.
Google and H&M’s new Android app will design a bespoke dress based entirely on your life and its variables.
Employing the API, Coded Couture samples personalised snippets of your life — this can be calendar information, if your climate is hot or cold, and even if your friends prefer casual hangouts or swanky black-ties — and translates this into usable, fashionable data.
Google calls this information “context signals”.
“After the course of a week, the user’s context signals are passed through an algorithm that creates a digitally tailored dress design for the user to purchase,” writes Google’s Jeremy Brook in Android’s Development blog.
The app will require access to your phone’s bevy of sensors though, and for some, that might be a privacy bridge too far.
Unfortunately, the app isn’t yet available for global appreciation just yet, and is undergoing a closed alpha development stage at present. There’s also no indication that the likes of Coco or Giorgio will be adding finishing touches to your rags.
Either way, and possibly very soon, we could have chic Android phones hosting their own fashion shows at New York Fashion Week.
About Andy Walker
Camper by day, run-and-gunner by night, Andy is editor at Memeburn and prefers his toast like his coffee -- dark and crunchy. Specialising in spotting the next big Instagram cat star, Andy also dabbles in smartphone and game reviews over on Gearburn.
