e-paper sneakers - indegogo - seems unlikely

[apelly]

This cropped up via engaget. Looks impossible to me.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/shiftwear-customize-your-kicks/#/

How can all this be possible and work?
The technology and components have already existed for years now. Its a matter of the different components smoothly working together. We just can't release our trade secrets for how we get it done, because of competition. As we get closer to release we will provide specific details to all our supporters.

Emphasis added.

[0xdeadbeef]

Anyway, it's nonsense. Maybe in 20 years or so. Besides: the wanted to collect only $25k which is simply a joke for ramping up a production, paying salaries etc.
And yeah well, flex funding...

[EEVblog]

Beside from the goal being ridiculously low, even if it did work (possible I guess), it would be horribly unreliable.
The lack of a prototype tells you all you need to know. They don't have a clue.

[Muttley Snickers]

This concept if it worked could backfire terribly, I wonder if they thought of this scenario below.

 

[sleemanj]

A totally flexible, water resistant, full colour, "ePaper", on a shoe.....

Even if a totally flexible, water resistat, full colour, ePaper existed, putting it on a shoe is unlikely to be conducive to it lasting more than 5 minutes I'd have thought.

Bullshit meter off the scale with this one.
 

[crispy_tofu]

 
Can it withstand the repetitive shock of walking/running? 

[Marco]

If you could make the top and bottom electrodes out of carbon fibre fabric you might be able to make it robust (the top electrode would have to be some kind of grid, so you could still see through it). Film electrodes I wouldn't give much of a chance.

RGB electronic paper has pretty awful contrast though.

[rgawron]

Apart of if it's possible or not to make today such thing, a surface of the shoe is not perfectly flat, so displayed shapes wouldn't look in the same way as those on the renderings.

[Bud]

Couple years back Toyota demonstrated a concept car called "Fun Vii" that could change exterior and interior appearance and communicate with networks.

[coppice]

There are a number of patent around the idea of using e-paper or cholesteric LCDs as an adaptable coating for things like clothes and phone cases. The phone cases seem like a realistic idea, but just because you made your display flexible doesn't mean it will tolerate the thousands of flexes a day the clothes get.

[tszaboo]

How much do you spend each month to keep your sneakers looking fresh?

Each month... Surely this is really a problem for some people. I guess there are people who wear their shoes only twice, because they are not stylish anymore.
The worst is... They've been on engadget, and the media seems to start hypeing them.
Color flexible durable e-ink display developed for less than a million bucks. Amazon probably never thought of that.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Funny how part way through, it changes from only displaying on the side panels, to displaying all over the surface including the lace holes....
Like ubeam - possible, maybe (but wouldn't look anywhere as good as the rendering), practical, nope.
Less so once you add in charging from footsteps.

Someone with the resources of Nike etc. could probably produce something along these lines, but zero chance of some no-name outfit doing it on 25K.
 

[Deathwish]

Oh great, another bunch of idiots who don't look where they are going coming up huh !

[electr_peter]

Based on indiegogo page we see that:

• funding is flexible
• funding target of $25k is far too low to be considered serious for such item
• no real prototype is shown. Yet, shipping date is set to Fall 2016
• Useless self advertisement is shown on top "Featured in"
• video editing is very fancy, typical of other indiegogo scams
• and above all - all images are essentially the same one sided image modified with photo editing software. That is - all campaign is in one video and few images!!! Nothing beyond that.

Conclusion - campaign is unrealistic and not-trustworthy. It is 100% likely to be a scam.

[timb]

Shiftwear? More like SHITwear, amirite?!

Seriously though, ePaper screens have terrible refresh rates, so there's no way animations will be even remotely close to what they are in the video. I've gotten 15fps out of a 2.3" panel, and that was with a simple icon of a fan rotating. (Normally you have to clear the screen when changing an image, that's why your Kindle inverts the screen when you change pages; but for simple animations in one area of the screen, especially repetitive things like the fan icon, you can get by without it.) You also require a ton of fast memory. This thing would need 128+Mbit of SRAM and a beefy CM4 or FPGA for image heavy displays like that. No way you get a week's battery life. An hour, maybe.

Also, unless they've got a white EL panel behind the display, it'll be useless at night or in the dark.

Anyone remember LA Gear sneakers? With the LEDs in the heel. I had a pair when I was a kid, so I'd love for this to be true. But it's not. Maybe in 20 years.

Edit: They say you get a week battery life, maybe they meant you get a *weak* battery life!

Sent from my Tablet

[station240]

And they raised $911,531, boy people are suckers.

I suppose they will do the usual and put the battery pack in the sole, obviously Li-Ion for the Energy density.
If they do actually make these shoes it will make the news, when the first owner treads on a nail and sets their foot ablaze.

[tszaboo]

They unfortunately made the news already. Common people lack common sense.

[Bob F.]

In my experience, "Common sense" is not as common as the phrase implies...

There is an interesting dynamic in these crowd-funding sites though.  It would seem fairly simple to produce a campaign to raise enough cash to keep you and your family employed for the next few years if you can pick a suitable project.  Spend 20% of the cash raised on actual product research (which will be garbage when eventually shipped but, hey-ho: "we did our best") and give the rest to yourself as salary.  None of which is a legal problem as people are simply investing in your project, not actually buying anything. 

Of course, you need to be a certain type of individual to do this, but there seems to be no shortage of such types, nor any shortage of sheep queuing up to be fleeced.

Now, where did I put my plans for that high-energy crystal self-healing quadrature dielectric positron discombobulator gizmo that would only cost a couple of million to perfect?...

[edy]

And they raised $911,531, boy people are suckers.

Not only are they suckers, but to make such a shoe (which is technically possible with a whole lot of effort) would require Apple-corporation sized R&D funds. That $1 million is nothing..... We are talking about mega-dollars required.

I can put a display on my shoe already. Just take apart an LCD MP3 player like this one:

http://www.buysku.com/wholesale/t871-4-3-inch-tft-lcd-portable-4gb-multi-media-player-with-fm-radio-sound-recorder-tf-slot-usb-jack-silver.html



Stick the panel to the side of your shoe and slide the internals in the sole of the shoe, and run the ribbon cable around. Sure, your shoe won't be flexible at all (without risking cracking the LCD panel) but can be done.

Anyways, spinning out an assembly line for flexible e-Ink displays of reasonable size to keep the costs of this project per shoe low enough is going to cost WAY WAY WAY more than what they are thinking, and take many more years than people are willing to wait.

[EEVblog]

I had forgotten about this one.
Not surprisingly I see no updates with actual photos of anything...