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Student Creates World's Fastest Shoe With a Printer
An anonymous reader writes "Engineer and designer Luc Fusaro from the Royal College of Art in London has developed a prototype running shoe that can be uniquely sculpted to any athlete's foot. It's as light as a feather too, weighing in at 96 grams. The prototype is aptly named, Designed to Win, and is 3D printed out of nylon polyamide powder, which is a very strong and lightweight material. The manufacturing process uses selective laser sintering (SLS), which fuses powdered materials with a CO2 laser to create an object. This process means 3D scans can be taken of the runner's foot so as to ensure the shoe matches the shape perfectly. Fusaro can also change the stiffness of the soles according to the athlete's physical abilities. The shoe can improve performance by 3.5%, meaning a 10 second 100-meter sprinter could see his time drop by 0.35 seconds, which is a huge time saving relatively speaking. Imagine if Usain Bolt put a pair of these running shoes on."
The article is essentially just the summary. The article links to another article, which is essentially just the summary too, although it mentions that the shoe has been tested on some world class athletes. No mention of the testing methodology though, for such a bold claim.
The article gets that wrong-- the 3.5% improvement is not something that's been specifically observed in this shoe. From the designer's site, "Scientific investigations have shown that tuning the mechanical properties of a sprint shoe to the physical abilities of an athlete can improve performance by up to 3.5%...." Which is to say, some sort of study has been done to demonstrate that custom-made track spikes can deliver that kind of improvement, but no data exists for this shoe specifically. The release on that site even goes on to note,"Fusaro continues to fine-tune the shoe: The upper is still too stiff to offer optimum speed. More flexibility and comfort needs to be added to the shoe, using a combination of different material or additive manufacturing processes that can offer different flexibilities in the same product."
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
This, yeah, assuming he's talking about Vibram FiveFingers. You also want to buy a pair that fit perfectly but a hair too tight rather than a pair that fits too loose. They stretch. After three months the "too loose" pair will flop around on your foot like clown shoes. I'm on my second pair, and I love them.
I recently bought a pair of those glove-like shoes (where each toe gets its own slot) that doesn't fit my feet very well.
First of all, make sure you didn't get a knock-off. The Vibram five finger shoes are cloned so much that they've been used as a case study for how counterfeiting (ehm, counterfeeting?) starts & how to prevent it.