Google built a talking shoe because they’re Google

Google specializes in two things: making the Internet better and easier to use, and making really weird consumer products that are incredibly neat and yet oddly useless. A laptop that breaks without any Internet? Sure! A pair of glasses that let you film everything while making you look like a jackass? Awesome!

And now, of course, we have a talking shoe.

To be fair, the Google shoe is not a consumer product. Yet, anyway. It’s actually an experiment on the part of Google to demonstrate the power of working technology into everyday objects:

The basic idea is that the shoe uses data it collects from various off-the-shelf sensors to update people about, well, everything. How fast you’re running, how your basketball game is doing, what you just stepped in… OK, maybe not that last, but pretty much everything else is on the table.

Currently, the talking shoe is just a demonstration model, but considering this was the company that thought we all wanted a music player where our friends could hijack our party playlist at any moment, we’re betting this is on the market in a year.

Talking Shoe [Art Copy & Code]