Expanding man's capabilities.
During the launch of the Sport Offense initiative that unites Nike's innovation departments, the brand revealed two projects that promise to redefine what it means to wear technology, a shoe that stimulates the mind-body connection and another capable of generating its own propulsion.
The first is the Mind line designed to activate the brain through the feet.
The sole has small foam protuberances called sensory nodes that move with each step, transmitting the texture of the ground directly to the nervous system. This stimulation, according to Nike, helps the user set the mentality before and after the competition, a technical way of saying that the shoe literally aligns body and mind.
The concept emerged from a neuroscience laboratory, the idea is that human performance does not depend only on muscles and oxygen, but also on perception, attention and mental state, but if Mind seeks to awaken the mind, Nike's second project wants to accelerate the body called Project Amplify.
It is an exoskeleton for the feet.
The system combines an electric motor, a battery, a strap that connects to the shoe adding extra force to the strides of the person who walks or runs, it is essentially a wearable exoskeleton created in collaboration with the robotics company Defi, a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab.
The tennis shoe features a carbon fiber plate and can operate with or without the propulsion device; In testing, more than 400 people totaled 2.4 million steps.
According to the company, the main idea was to give the athlete a small invisible push, something that, if it was the lightest and most fun movement, behind the design and the inspiring phrases, there is a pattern that is beginning to be repeated in several industries, the fusion between the biological and the technological.
