Sunday, July 15, 2012

"3-D printed shoes that could help sprinters shatter records"

Yeah, yeah I know 3-D printing can create the vascular system an artificial liver would require.
This story is way cooler though. Look at the picture, with these things I'm Mercury:
For his final project at the Royal College of Art in London, Luc Fusaro outlined a process for building custom-fitting sprinting shoes that weigh just 96 grams.
Laser Sintered Shoes

The shoes are fabricated using a selective laser sintering process that uses precise 3-D scans of an athlete's foot to achieve maximum fit. The really tantalizing (but unfortunately uncited) bit about Fusaro's design is that by fitting shoes to a sprinter's feet so precisely, significant performance improvements might result:
Scientific investigations have shown that tuning the mechanical properties of a sprint shoe to the physical abilities of an athlete can improve performance by up to 3.5%....MORE at Kottke.org