A GPS in your feet
My Role:
• Conducted research on navigation systems and the different types of products for them
• Conducted secondary research
• Assisted in coding the final prototype
The Team:
3 UX Designers
Duration:
10 days
Product type:
Experience room
Overview
Sole Mate is a pair of smart shoes that help you navigate without using your phone. It directs you to your destination through lighting up a path with the help of the LED lights that are connected to the sole of the shoe. One simply needs to put in their destination into their phones and not feel the need to pull it out again. It is a device that is essentially pulling out features from the phone that don’t belong there and introducing them organically into peoples lives, in situations where phones only seem like an extra burden, like going for a run . This project tries to look at the world through a ubiquitous lens, where one day technology will be so engrained in our natural surrounding that at some point it is bound to disappear. This is an attempt to reach that future, communicating through a visual language and not asking for your undivided attention at all times.
Concept and Inspiration
Inspiration for this project was pulled from the book enchanted obkects by David Rose to try and design speculatively for the future where technology has moved beyond the screen into our daily lives which will help us engage with the world more. Arthur C. Clarke once said
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” We wanted to create a futuristic system, that will resemble and have a magical feel to it. This exploration was done through shoes that acted as your GPS. This way it would move the attention from the phone to the world around them.
Ideation
Our inspiration also stemmed from sci fi or fiction movies, identifying objects from harry potter like the invisible cloak, the sneakers with wings from Percy Jackson and the hovering skateboard from back to the future, or flying cars, from literally every si-fi movie.
We identified a single genre we wanted to look into, and decided on telepathy. We brainstormed to find potential technologies that would loosely use the concept of telepathy for development. Technology that helps people who are far from each other to communicate.
After our brain storming session we decided on shoes that act as a GPS, That was packed with features that would help one communicate.
How does it work?
Features:
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To add people as your friend tap the button on the back of the shoe.
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The LED strip on the shoe will light a certain section, that will tell you which direction you need to go in.
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Each friend has a designated colour, you can switch whom you want to go on a run with by tapping the button on the side.
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The button on the side is for requests. To accept a request press it once, to deny press it twice.
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To alert someone if you are in danger, you simply need to press the button on the back of the shoe for an SOS, the friends that follow you will be alerted of your location.
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If one taps the shoe down twice, it will tell you the time with the light pattern.
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To switch off the shoes navigation function, one needs to keep the back button pressed.
Functionality
We decided to prototype one of the features out of all of them that we thought of, which was navigation. To make a set of lights out of the entire LED light strip, point towards the navigation route towards the desired destination, we had to connect the arduino to our phones.
To wizard of oz the prototype, we got a bluetooth module hc-05, which could read the sensor data from your phone. Although as a backup we had a code that we could control using our laptops and a few keys would turn on the set of lights in a few directions on the shoe, we still wanted it to be more dynamic by connecting a phone.
We got it to read the orientation sensor data on an android phone and coded a set of 4 lights to turn on, when the phone was turned in each 36 out of 360 degrees ie. if your phone was moved anywhere between 0-36 degrees, lights 1-4 would turn on, and 37-72 degrees lights 5-8, etc. so on and so forth for 10 of such sections.
For the experience of navigation using lights on the shoes, we decided to wizard of oz it by controlling lights with the orientation of a phone.