Picture yourself as a newbie in town. You don’t know the city well, you have no car and you’ve got a job interview in the early a.m. It’s a snowy day!! You got a laptop bag in one hand and a portfolio in the other. The last thing you want to do is stop and look into the map. All you want to do it walk as fast as you can from the metro station to the interview place and make sure you arrive on time.
British artist and designer Dominic Wilcox has created a pair of smart leather shoes which would assist you in leading the way. These formal pair of shoes have been embedded with a GPS system. Yes Sir!
“I was commissioned by the Global Footprint project in Northamptonshire, a place famous for shoe making, to create some shoes. I decided to make a pair of shoes that can navigate you to anywhere you wish to travel to. I thought about the Wizard of Oz and how Dorothy could click her shoes together to go home.” says Dominic Wilcox.
All you need to do is feed in your destination address in the shoes through a piece of custom made mapping software and a USB cable and the GPS embedded in the heel gets activated by a heel click. The left shoe comes with a ring of lights that directs you on the right path and the right shoe has a progress bar of lights that show how close you are to the destination.
Wilcox worked in collaboration with interactive arts and technology expert Becky Stewart and local Northampton shoe maker Stamp Shoes to create a pair of fully functional GPS shoes.
Preparing the leather
Integrating electronics
Right shoe acts as a progress bar and Left shoe points in the desired direction