Talking shoes…
Posted on May 24, 2006
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Nike and Apple have announced Nike+iPod. This lets your shoes talk to your iPod and communicate things like distance, time, pace, calories burned, etc.
This is freaking cool. Cheap too at $29. Wireless! I’m curious to see if the Nike+iPod system will be hacked in interesting ways.
This immediately reminded me of something I saw 10 years ago at the Media Lab 10 year reunion. Professor Neil Gershenfeld demonstrated a prototype that allowed people to exchange business cards with a handshake (using “shoe computers.”)
I was a contemporary at MIT with folks like Steve Mann (referred to here as the “grandfather of wearable computers“, and Thad Starner (who actually UROP’d for Martin and me back in the day.)
I must admit feeling somewhat annoyed at these early experiments in wearable computing. The get-ups surely looked ridiculous. Steve and Thad were totally conspicuous as they walked around campus. (Remember, ten+ years ago we’re talking about tens of pounds of gear.)
Now I experience trauma and seperation anxiety if I’m out of contact with my Treo for more than a minute.
Thanks Steve, Thad, Sandy, et. al. for your brave pioneering efforts in this field. Thanks Nike and Apple for something very cool, though admittedly not for me.
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Do you think that the Nike + iPod union will be hack-friendly? I know there are some interesting projects where Linux has been loaded onto the iPod (see Rockbox) and probably some other clever things. However, Apple doesn’t seem very hack-friendly - especially when it cuts into their bottom line (booting MacOS on a PC, rather than a Mac = no hardware sales for Apple).
What’s the extent or range of data that’s fed to the iPod from the shoes? Any idea? Can you hook up a tap-dance routine? Can it pick an appropriate beat for your pace? Can it make appropriate suggestions based on this information?
“You seem to be climbing museum stairs.” Rocky theme begins playing.
“It looks like you lost the race.” Wah wah waaaaaah.
“I don’t think that puppy you kicked is getting back up.” Taps.
Oh, the possibilities…
Regarding the apps…. Exactly!
You’re right though - Apple isn’t really known for being hack friendly. I’ve been unable to find much data on the technical specs…
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but the “problems” corporate-types tend to have with hackers in general revolve around control and, therefore, profit. Taking Microsoft as an example - they will follow the age old marketing practice of segmenting the market. Through forces I don’t yet understand, taking the same product and crippling it, and selling it at different price points depending on how crippled it is, makes more money than selling the uncrippled product for a fixed price. I assume that money is made on the bottom rung product, so therefore, this tactic really just gives them an excuse to mark-up the price of the uncrippled version.
I, as a consumer, feel that when I purchase something, I own it. When you own something, you can do as you please with it, in general (this is the common-sense assumption, at least). But if I buy a copy of Microsoft Windows Home, and then flip a bit (or a bit more in this case), to get Microsoft Windows Professional, this is deemed inappropriate by the company, even though it doesn’t really cost (or, at least, don’t have to cost) the company anything for me to do that. I suppose the marketing word for this is “opportunity cost”?
Anyway, the obvious place I’m going with this is as long as the clever uses discovered for the new shuPod (I probably should trademark that…) don’t conflict with the tiered marketing approach of Apple, I think there won’t be any friction.
I like Rockbox, which I use for my iRiver iHP-120 because it enables features that were never possible with the default firmware. Although I don’t listen to music anymore (despite the examples I gave above), I can now listen to FLAC files on my iRiver, I can record lectures without silly limits (default iRiver firmware capped WAV recording to 700MB files, and would always record in stereo, so that effectively limited recording time to just under 80 minutes). In addition, the decoding of Ogg Vorbis audio is now more battery efficient than the original software.
These kinds of improvements vastly benefit the consumer, but they don’t help the producers much, or at all. So it’s a battle…
Sorry, I’ll step down from my soapbox (check out my anti-marketing tirade over at Jeremy’s blog…just so you don’t feel special…;))