Nike-Apple Smart Shoes

Nike and Apple have announced the Nike Plus line of shoes that integrate with an iPod Nano through an antenna that attaches to the iPod. As far as I can tell, the shoes broadcast telemetry and the Nano collects it and then downloads the data to software running on your computer as it syncs the music (which is grouped into playlist-based workouts). This may be the biggest commercial wearable computing project since the Adidas 1 robotic adaptive shoe (and, tangentially, an interesting departure from Nike's previous technology venture with Philips, which produced some MP3 players in the 90s--Nike + Apple clearly makes more sense brand-wise in today's market), and there are many more models than that product--which went from running shoe to basketball shoe in its latest incarnation.

The possibilities are, again, pretty interesting: because they broadcast (even if near-field) and probably broadcast with a unique ID (so that two people running together don't get each others' telemetry) these shoes could be used to track people in the panoptic scenario, but they could also produce a much more sophisticated pedometer. For example, why just sports shoes? Why not make a deal with Campers and give urban hipster iPod users an idea of whether they should have just walked home instead of taking the subway 10 blocks? Or Bruno Magli? Or why not do a version of Dance Dance Revolution without the pad? (well, OK, maybe just a simple two-leg hokey pokey version) I'm waiting for someone to hack it.

No TrackBacks

TrackBack URL: http://orangecone.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/205

1 Comment

You guys should checkout the shoes that came out from Nike with Ipod applications. Nike and Apple coming together is a perfect combination and if this can motivate a healthier lifestyle than more power to them.

Ads

Archives

ThingM

A device studio that lives at the intersections of ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, industrial design and materials science.

The Smart Furniture Manifesto

Giant poster, suitable for framing! (300K PDF)
Full text and explanation

Recent Photos (from Flickr)

Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design

By me!
ISBN: 0123748992
Published in September 2010
Available from Amazon

Observing the User Experience: a practitioner's guide to user research

By me!
ISBN: 1558609237
Published April 2003
Available from Amazon

Recent Comments

  • Nike SB: You guys should checkout the shoes that came out from read more

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Mike Kuniavsky published on May 23, 2006 2:39 PM.

"Hiding the technology" was the previous entry in this blog.

Gartner on non-graphical UI is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.