These boots may have been made for walking, but were they made for texting, emailing and surfing the web? That’s a question we at Crunchwear have long pondered and it looks like we have finally got our answer. A brilliant researcher by the name of Gilles Bailley has come up with a concept design so wild, so wacky it just might make you never wear open-toed shoes ever again. You should stop doing that anyways. You are liable to get cut.
Mr. Bailley’s genius idea, called ShoeSense, lets you discreetly use your smartphone using gestures. The system is comprised of a small, single-board computer with a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor and 512MB of on-board memory, a shoe-mounted depth camera(in the form of a Microsoft Kinect) and a battery pack. The result? You can use gestures to make your smartphone do any manner of awesome thing. It uses a combination of three different gesture sets: Triangle, radial and finger-count. Watch the video below. This thing works like a dream! It’s a whole lot of hardware to lug around, though. Don’t count on this working with high heels or the aforementioned Birkenstock.
According to Gilles, ShoeSense will be particularly useful when you want to quickly carry out common tasks without reaching for your phone. We think it could also end up being useful for performance art pieces and playing Angry Birds the way it was meant to be played, by twirling your fingers like a mad man. Again, this is just a concept design but it has been built and is in proper working order. The technologically inclined ought to watch the video and piece together how he did it.
