Rock bands and innovation go together more often than some might suspect. With stage components to consider as well as improvements in social media and marketing tools to manage fan bases, rock bands actually have quite a few tools in the toolbox, technology-wise, and now, Google (News - Alert) is bringing out one more. It's collaborating with Italian rock band Subsonica to bring gifs to the stage, and in a way that might not ordinarily be expected.

The Google / Subsonica collaboration is timed around the release of the group's new hit “Di Domenica,” and calls upon Subsonica fans to turn to Google's new Google+Motion gif-maker to create a new gif around the theme of what Sunday means to the gif creators in question. Where Subsonica comes into play, meanwhile, is that the band will be wearing jackets that serve as projector screens of a sort, and winning animations will be projected onto said jackets as Subsonica performs “Di Domenica” on an upcoming tour later this year. The campaign itself, dubbed “Incredibly Close” by its creator Isobar (News - Alert), will be supported by a variety of marketing measures, including a social media outreach and a collection of YouTube videos. Isobar's Nick Craske pointed out in a set of remarks that “Incredibly Close” was designed to “...show(s) how new fashion and music can combine with Google technology to bring the music fan experience into the 21^st century”.

This actually serves as a demonstration of several noteworthy principles all in one place. One, it shows how wearable technology has the potential to shake up most any field of endeavor when it's applied in a particular fashion. The use of jackets as projector screens for gifs likely never occurred to many users, and poses the question, might this be a possible use of the technology later on? With the growth of the pico projector, could we see simple T-shirts or the like used as gif screens, with T-shirts having constantly moving images contained therein? Two, it also shows how interconnected promotion can be with the various aspects of Google technology working together. A Google project in Google+Motion is being promoted by YouTube (News - Alert) videos, and a social outreach system that will likely on at least some level include Google+. That's a lot of combined Google tech working in one place. Add in the fact that a rock band is putting this concept to work first and still other possibilities open up; after all, we're talking about a popular Italian group; this might get some extra legs in terms of a younger market demographic wanting to emulate its musical heroes, so to speak, and in turn generate new developments as yet unconsidered. Throw in the recently-designed robotic fabric from Purdue and that opens the field up still further.

Between the growth of wearable technology and the incredible marketing power that Google can bring to bear in one place, it's clear that the Subsonica / Google partnership will make for some exciting new exhibitions of wearable technology in action. This could be the start of a new movement in the field, and some impressive new developments still to come that arise from what we've seen here today. Only time will tell what exactly comes out of all this, but as noted previously, there are plenty of possibilities afoot.