The Sneaker hype gained more and more attention during the last years compared to other products. They are no longer sport shoes only, but emerged as everydays shoes and in some cases as part of a fashion statement among youth culture. The majority don’t know what they wear on their feet. In order to eliminate this ignorance we built an interactive cummunication system which informs you about Sneaker Design and History in a store or exhibition.

We developed an interactive communication system with a simpel information architecture allowing manageable and tangible usage. The target of the project is to display deeper insights into the design and technology of sneakers. In order to demonstrate this, we used one of the most iconic sneakers of the 90s and today.

While the information about the sneaker is projected on a wall the iPad is used to navigate through the different topics. The center of the system is occupied by a virtual 3D-model of a sneaker, which can be controlled by rotating the presented shoe in real time.

The User is able to choose from a variety of sneaker and place it on the pedestals platform in front of him. Using NFC the System is able to track which Sneaker is chosen, now. The embedded display in the pedestal serves as navigation interface and guides the user though the system. By swiping on the display he/she can switch between three topics, which will be streamed on a huge projection in front of him/her.

Though the most interesting aspect is that the sneaker itself can be used for various interactions. In order to make the shoes’ haptic perceptible and create a direct comparison between materials and design we implemented a 3-dimensional model of the sneaker moving simultaneously to the movements of the real sneaker. This enables a contextualised explanation of what the user sees and feels during that moment. In the last part the user can navigate through the sneakers design chronolgy and contrast the different models.

The setup consists of a projection, tablet as input device and an iPhone's gyro sensor which was placed inside of the sneaker. We used the platform shiftr.io to connect the two input devices with our receiver (MacBook) as the components should be able to communicate among each other. The iPad sends the users navigation data while the iPhone keeps pushing it's gyro data through the network.