Nike today announced that it has built the HyperAdapt 1.0, the first athletic shoe that is tied to itself and will appear on store shelves within 2016 at a price that has not yet been determined.
Most of you will remember the movie "Back to the Future" in 1989, where the protagonist Marty McFly traveled to the future and wore a pair of Nike Air Mag shoes which to his surprise when he put them on his feet they tightened on their own. It has been 27 years since then, and in the meantime there has been a lot of speculation about when (and if) science fiction technology will ever become a reality.
Then, last autumn, Nike flew a bomb: Yes, the shoes with dynamic bonding may be in the near future. It seems that the future suddenly became present, because today Nike has announced that the first pair of self-tied shoe will appear in 2016. The shoe is called HyperAdapt 1.0, and is visually close to what McFly was then wearing in the movie.
John Hoke, Nike's vice president of design, explains that the HyperAdapt 1.0 shoe does not use a traditional lashing system, but a powerful battery and a series of pulleys that tighten the shoe's neck. When the user steps inside the shoe, the sensors at the bottom of the shoe sense its weight and the position of the foot inside. "It reads whether you are heavy on the heel or heavy on the toes," says Hoke.
Once the sensors read the position of your foot, a series of tiny pulleys will tighten the shoe's neck tightly around the foot by wrapping a string around a spool. "Imagine it as a fishing rod," says Hoke. “The user can adjust the tightness by pressing for a plus or a minus on the left side of the shoe. "Hold it for two seconds, and the shoe will relax completely, allowing blood flow to increase and be removed."
Nike says it wants to make micro-adjustments automated so that the shoe reacts with the biometric data for continuous adjustment on your foot.
Speaking again with parallels, Mr. Hoke says that, after a few times you wear it, the shoe will automatically adjust to the setting you prefer, like a car seat that knows how close to the steering wheel you like to sit. As the name "1.0" suggests, it has to do with the quests of the development team that is already looking for how this technology can be improved and adapted to a super-personalized platform.
All this is definitely impressive, perhaps a bit strange, as it seems that in the end the companies will have all the biometric features of their customers and it also seems to be still in their infancy, something like Windows 1.0.
For those who are not cut out to be the first to figure out that crazy gadget is released, traditional cords show so far to be reliable that they will never make you worry about any malfunction during a critical moment !!!
However, for those who insist on Hi-Tech technology, let us know that Nike's HyperAdapt 1.0 will work with a battery that lasts for two weeks with just one charge, and that the potential cost of the original purchase is definitely too high, as well to anything that appears for the first time in the world. On the other hand it might be a small price to wear a shoe of the future, is not it?
See below a Nike HyperAdapt 1.0 presentation video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Cyv3cvIxY
