“Have you ever had shoes without shoestrings?” Kanye West intoned in 2009's “Run This Town” collaboration with Jay-Z and Rihanna. The self-styled genius and fashion auteur maybe forgot that Velcro exists, but his line could almost as easily describe Nike's new HyperAdapt 1.0 sneakers with "adaptive lacing", debuted by the long-running footwear giant in New York today.
In the 1989 hit move Back To The Future Part II, our protagonist Marty McFly travels to what was then the strange and distant future day of October 21, 2020, encountering all sorts of strange modern technologies, like hoverboards, dog-walking drones, and Nike shoes that lace themselves up That's today (US time), and while our hoverboards are far from cinematic perfection, Nike has gone ahead and brought the shoes from the movie into real life.
Nike has developed a means of increasing visual short-term memory retention and physical reaction time via a set of strobing goggles that rob athletes in training of some of their vision. The SPARQ Sensory Performance system evaluates an athlete for 10 visual performance skills and creates a training program specifically for him or her that involves wearing Nike's SPARQ Vapor Strobe Eyewear, which basically fog over to block the wearer's vision for short periods of time, forcing the athlete to anticipate what's coming next.
Luc Fusaro, a French engineering and design student who does not work for Nike or any other shoe company, is creating a 3-D-printed running shoe. It's revolutionary, but he's hoping it barely affects runners at all. To be precise (and maybe optimistic), the shoes - branded "Designed to Win" - could shave 3.5 percent off a runner's time. That's it. But in the professional running world, that's the difference between Olympic glory and heading home in defeat.
Nike's TurboSpeed, which sounds like the name of a Hot Wheels playset, is an ultra-lightweight track suit designed to help sprinters reach that extra height. Oddly, it's inspired by the golf ball, which is why it has all those odd little dimples. But we prefer to think of them as speed holes.
Nike just announced that it's bringing the famed self-tying, light-up sneakers from Back to the Future II to market as a limited edition, under the name Nike Air Mag. They're not tech-free, boasting some flashy LED lighting, but everyone knows the main draw of the movie's shoes was the self-tying--and these shoes could have been so much more futuristic. It may not be 2015, the year depicted in the movie, just yet, but that doesn't mean we don't deserve self-tying shoes right now, dammit. Here are some possible routes to the true self-tying shoe.
