Your shoes are about to be clever thanks to Google, EA and Adidas developing smart insoles

This piece of wearable technology will connect up to your mobile device and track your performance as you play football in real life, including statistics on kick speed, power and overall movement. These stats will then be translated into rewards on FIFA Mobile, the mobile version of the best-selling video game series.

You know what video games have that real life doesn’t? Numbers. Lots of them. Numbers for everything you do! They can be super helpful too as they let you figure out strengths, weakness, areas of improvement and just generally provide a bit of guidance. If we could somehow have stats in our everyday lives, can you imagine the improvements (and stress?). Well, it seems that a whole mess of companies want to bring this dystopian future into the now with a set of smart insoles called the Adidas GMR.

A joint project between Google, Adidas and EA, the intelligent insoles are being built using Google’s Jacquard wearable technology, previously only seen in some very expensive jackets and a backpack, these clever insoles are designed to offer you all the important information you need on your football performance whilst also netting you some neat virtual rewards for FIFA Mobile.

Costing about $40, the Adidas GMR comes with two insoles, a Jacquard tag for your dominant foot and a dummy tag for your off foot. The tags slip neatly into the insoles and the insoles slide into whatever shoes you’re playing in. Through the magic of Bluetooth, these tags will track physical movements and then beam this information to your phone where it will be translated into loot for FIFA Mobile. Which is super fun, we guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.

To access the in-game functionality, you’ll first need to download the Adidas GMR app, sync your tag to it and then link your FIFA Mobile account. This opens up exclusive challenges to complete every day to unlock more stuff within the game, encouraging consistent exercise.

If you’re not much of a football player or not really all that into FIFA Mobile then this product is utterly useless to you, but if you so happen to fall into that demographic, we could see why this sort of thing is appealing. Before leaping in maybe wait until there’s a version that doesn’t require you take your shoe apart to charge it…