Interactive Sound Shoes

Way before the 'So You Can Dance' and 'Dancing With the Stars' odd-ball-pseudo-reality-70's flashback-variety shows... Gregory Hines put out a film called "Tap" where he wired up tap shoes to midi/synths.

I'm not sure if these were ever functional or if they were part of a hollywood effect... But this concept isn't new... however the methods of interactivity and sound effects available have improved on the initial idea.

Enter Sound Shoes

Tina Jespersen from Cat In Orbit (www.catinorbit.com) has one of her projects involving shoes fitted with pressure sensors and wired into Max PSP. Walking around in the shoes creates audio effects like walking in gravel, leaning forward on your toes triggers a mouse-click that swaps out the sound effect and then you're walking in puddles of water. Although these are wired, this could easily be updated with Flash 8, MakingThings/Teleo, mp3 audio recorder and a few force sensors or bend sensors.

Although I can see sound effects shoes like this paired (no pun intended) with kids shoes that have blinking lights activated as they step, jump or run around in them... This input method not only could be used with gee-wiz audio effects but could integrate with data driven, interactive applications similar to Apple/Nike Sync. One could create a health/phys ed game for kids to increase movement and exercise - jumping, stomping and shaking... would give a whole new meaning to hoky-poky.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• interactive
• art
• design
• max
• flash
• actionscript
• makingthings

[jtspitfire]

those would be the ultimate stealth shoes !!

[Sparkey93]

ok all i saw was some shoes with weight snesors that were wired to the computer which made sounds. no point in that, not really anything intelligent eithor

[williamthomasmi10]

I've actually seen versions of these made for like... drumming. They're remarkably easy to make as far as I understand. Just some Piezo transducers.

[mofotronimus]

is this a result of keyboard hacking?

[Liusila]

Wow, they suck. Sorry.

[StanleyAdams]

is there any ongoing development of this? is it in production?

[drfink222]

i could definately see this being used in some sort of roll playing field, maybe a videogame of somesort, or a tactical training field

[punkyfon]

ok then...

[oed]

The result shown here is an interesting start. It'd be more interesting if there were gyros wired in that would interpret sweeping motions of the legs/feet... perhaps as pitch shifting or other "velocity" based effects. Definitely a lot of potential.