This was my thought as well. Reminds me of Google Glass. A bit too strange looking to get much use by regular people, but there may be legit applications among niche groups of professionals.
It reminded me of Google Glass as in it reminded me of DoA product. To be honest though, I thought that they looked far less strange and more useful than these shoes. I still grieve for their passing.
Odds of this company being relevant are nil. If this product ever becomes popular it will be because of a $300 chinese knockoff. However I very much doubt that it will be able to overcome the cultural association of sillyness and the aesthetic disaster that is "rolly-sandals with shoes".
For everyday use, maybe. For someone whos job requires them to walk along flat surfaces all day, this could be a worthy investment for a company to make.
Companies with big warehouses are already buying cheap regular old bikes for getting around, or even trikes where you can carry stuff on a little truck bed in the back.
Agree. Especially considering that rollerskates and rollerblades kind of already fulfill this function (just are bulkier, and take more skill to use, but honestly are easy enough to learn) and people don't usually use those for commuting in urban areas.
That said, when I lived in Chicago, I used to see a lady who rollerbladed to the office. I am sure you're thinking, "Young techie, jeans & t-shirt", but you'd be wrong. 40's or late 30's, dressed like an exec. Wearing a dress, make-up, string of pearls, with a fancy handbag, nice haircut. I don't think this is a relevant data point (clearly an outlier), I just thought it was awesome and wanted to share.
From personal experience, Chicago is kind of both the best case and the worst case for rollerblading: it's very flat and has nice wide sidewalks, but the sidewalks and even the streets are pretty rough and require large wheels for a smooth ride.
Having a good amount of reasonably well maintained dedicated bike lanes would have made rollerblading to work a lot easier!
Totally agree. I biked around the streets, and it's tough. Bike lanes are somewhat respected by drivers, and somewhat respected by people parking on the street, which in aggregate makes them not all that well respected...
People get creamed on bikes all the time in bike lanes. Pedestrians on the sidewalks and bike paths just don't pay attention to anything other than what is 3-4 feet from them, and are always forcing you to dodge if you have any kind of speed if you're just even jogging.
It's more a cultural problem than a city planning problem. Contrast how seriously bike lanes are treated in (say) Munich, which is very seriously.
Chicago's pavement will always be in difficult shape due to the climate and, more importantly, the incredible amounts of road salt used to keep the roads ice-free.
I am seeing more and more e-bikes though, which, since you can keep up with traffic relatively well, allow you ride in the car lane under most circumstances. That's what I do, and if some dickhead really feels the need to pass me when I'm going >25mph, I'll give them a wave at the next light. And probably be shot in the chest one of these days.
I wonder where the break-even point hits that it becomes cheaper to plumb hot water pipes or electrified heating elements under better-built sidewalks than to resurface every year.
> That said, when I lived in Chicago, I used to see a lady who rollerbladed to the office.
I used to skateboard from a lot by the Metra station to the office @ State and Madison.
Most fellow commuters I encountered were visibly bothered by sharing the walkways with someone adult-sized traveling 2-3X their speed. I'd expect a similar level of antisocial friction with these shoes.
Though it has been well over a decade since I did that, maybe people have since warmed up to sharing sidewalks with ebikes/scooters by now.
Most ebike/scooter use is done in the street from what I've seen. Streets are the right place for ebikes, which are basically mopeds, though I don't think escooters are safe on the street for users nor on the sidewalk for pedestrians.
It would feel extremely sketchy to ride an escooter on the sidewalk with all the blind corners or entryways people are liable to pop out from.
The best thing you could do with an escooter is to do what bike riders do to be safe, which is to take the entire lane. Car's might get pissed and honk when they pass you, but its better to force them to merge into a separate lane to get around you, than to try to squeeze through the same lane you are in and force you into parked cars or the gutter.
Oh trust me, I wouldn't feel good about riding an e-scooter on a sidewalk either, they're too fast and it's a nuance to the pedestrians sidewalks are built for. But I also wouldn't feel personally safe riding an e-scooter on a street; the small wheels of a usual scooter make it inherently unstable at the sort of speeds the electric motor can easily propel it to.
Basically I don't think there is any safe and responsible way to use an e-scooter. I don't think they should exist, it's just a bad idea. e-bikes are great though.
It might be a viable product industrially, eg pickers working in large warehouses or similar. But it has to be actually better than just a basic Lime style electric scooter.
That's expressing a lot of confidence for something that I assume you don't know much about?
I've repeatedly looked for this exact product in the past, "wheel-augmented shoes", for my 10-to-30 minutes travels (to the shop, to the public transportation, to a friend's...). So as anecdata, I would absolutely be interested in this: maybe not at $1400 but I'd certainly pay a few hundreds.
> cultural association of sillyness and the aesthetic disaster that is "rolly-sandals with shoes".
I don't know how many "that's what was said of Airpods" are needed for this argument to die. Actually, I'm much less weirded out by these shoes than I was of airpods, I don't find them silly at all
It's probably because the aesthetic here is relatively bland, and sandals are an existing form-factor of shoe. Airpods are aggressively sleek and white, and they sit in a weird uncanny valley of accessory and tool. Technically, wired earbuds have the same hanging-stem, but everyone's used to them, so no one notices them.
As to the aesthetics, I'm sure people thought the same of all types of bicycles. Penny-farthings used to be the cultural norm, and people still ride less-common forms like small-wheel and recumbent bicycles.
> I don't know how many "that's what was said of Airpods" are needed for this argument to die
Apple has always been the exception that proves the rule in the types of cases. Very, very few companies are able to create demand rather than merely satisfying it.
On top of that only experience with Airpods is as the current gen teenage reality blockers and older people screaming through static about how they must have run theirs through the wash.
Re looking silly, I am not so sure. Only 10 years ago no one would have expected adults to proudly navigate the city on flashy colored elwctric kick scooters, and yet look at any big (european?) city nowadays. Even investment bankers in tailor-made suits move on those abominations as if it was the next lamborghini.
I actually find them quite attractive as a means to access my local train station: easier to take with me than a bike or kick scooter, apparently much safer than rollerblades or skateboard. Just not for that price, but let's give it a few years to see if it takes on.
Not useless but it went extinct in my part of the world. I can't remember when I saw one in Europe. People shot selfies with their arms again. Is it still a thing somewhere else?
It's a thing in the U.S. still but a lot of places have banned them. Where you do see the selfie stick sometimes is skiing, but I think they are using an actual gopro product for that mostly.
Aesthetic taste and fashion are hard to predict; people said the same thing of Crocs. In fact, many workplaces banned Crocs because they were considered so aesthetically offensive. Crocs, Inc. is up 725% over its lifetime.
People are really into weird shoes right now (see pretty much all of sneakerhead culture). I could see this taking off if partnered with the right influencer and offered at about $500-$600.
On Chinese knockoffs: yes, this is a danger with nearly any product made today. If they achieve brand prominence then the risk will be mitigated. Their apparent moat seems to be making walking feel natural. This may be temporarily difficult to reverse engineer and give them some lead time.
Good question, but I think this breaks as well. It would be interesting to have a freewheel mechanism roller skates though. I think some hand-operated breaks would be a good addition too (or maybe some mechanical timer that breaks when you're not doing a walking motion anymore)
I don't know if 5 miles is long enough for the people who actually need it, but if I was a postal worker, these would be pretty sweet. And 1400 USD is cheaper than some car insurance here in Canada for young males.
At least in my neighborhood I think these would be more trouble than they're worth. It's a historic neighborhood so all the houses are built up on berms from when they dug the basements cuz the streets were full of muddy manure, so every walk up to a mailbox has stairs. Unless you're agile enough to go down stairs without doing the lock/unlock dance, these would probably slow you down overall.
I watched the video, which is why I called it the lock unlock dance. Note that in that video, which is obviously going to be the best looking version of it they can show, it's still a pretty significant pause in your motion, because the control is both motion and timing based. Doing that two times per house for the 10 miles or so a carrier walks is gonna get old.
It has a 3.0 Ah battery (not Wh, assume one 18650 lipo cell -> 11 Wh), comparable with a smartphone or flashlight. At a full 300W discharge, you're emptying the batteries in just over 2 minutes. You'd better have well-insulated soles before stepping on a pair of 150W space heaters, also, no 18650s are rated for 100C discharge, 20C is a lot and 5C is more common for the high-capacity low-discharge 3.0 Ah cells.
You get 5 mile range by using them like roller skates, using your own legs to power them. The motors are just to aid in walking up stairs and such.
Damn, this could substitute for my bicycle commute. I could just walk the distance in the same time. That would be sick. But I don't want to try at $1.4k
Right, but because of one-ways the fastest route for me walking is half a mile shorter than on a bicycle. It's the compactness that appeals to me. I live in SF so I often don't take my bicycle somewhere because it'll be stolen. It only has to put me in the same ball park (~10 min) to make it worth it.
> Military-grade, multiple redundancy electronics hardware, running our in-house OS with jet propulsion level stability add the final layer of peace of mind.
That is a lot of buzz-words, and sort of hinting at JPL but failing.
At the end of the video, the exploded view shows a crazy gear train, synchronizing those 10 wheels per shoe sounds tough.
I watched a review from a shoe guy about these. He was very impressed with the wheel design - basically the inset raised wheels allow them to mimic a larger radius wheel and handle potholes and such smoothly.
The designer did talk about how failures would be very bad (and it sounded like he had experienced plenty of fails with the earlier designs to be speaking from experience) which might be why they are pushing the terminology there.
I can make a very good looking and well designed cake out of human feces, I'd still go for the 100 years old tested and proven brownie recipe that looks like a brick though. No matter how well something is designed, if it's stupid it's stupid
In the video it said something about running data through a neuromuscular model. And: "Our AI uses machine learning algorithms to adapt to a user's walking gaits, making them an extension of people's legs."
For all that, the person's gait looks strange to me, like they aren't using their muscles normally. Maybe they are focused on landing the skate evenly on the wheels, or not getting off balance? Walking gait involves heel-strike and toe-lift-off phases and I would think if you mess with these they aren't going to feel comfortable after wearing a while.
As a passionate rollerblader who's been practising for over 10 years, I've lost count of the multiple attempts at reinventing shoes with wheels, maybe people should just learn how to skate? :)
The main thing that separates speed walking ("race walking") from running is that you must always have a point of contact with the ground.
That said, I've seen some articles of high speed video taken of pro race walkers and basically all of them have tiny moments where both feet are off the ground. Just not egregious enough for a referee to detect.
In general, seems like a really contrived sport, but to each his own...
I once read an interview with a writer/producer on Malcolm who said early on they realized there wasn't anything Bryan Cranston wouldn't do. They specifically tried to come up with things for Hal to do to challenge Cranston, and he never said no.
There are other requirements: the lead knee has to be straight from the moment the foot touches the ground to when the knee passes under the body. (or something like that)
$1400 doesn't seem that bad for the very first product of this type compared to other e-mobility stuff. E-bikes can cost around that price point (and way more of course) and they're a mature category. Scooters are much cheaper of course, but again, this is the first product of this type.
Yeah it was impressive. The reviewer was comfortable very quickly and was able traverse real city streets without incident. It looks a really clever design.
I was wondering how they could traverse rough terrain like gravel. That video explains how the overlapping wheels makes that possible. Why not go with a "tank tread" type design? Maybe in a future hiking version.
I'm assuming different wheels are accelerating at slightly different speeds so you aren't hitting the pavement with a tread going at full speed. It needs to adjust to the different speed of your gait at different points of your step.
That's why the "tank tread" likely wouldn't work here.
Was surprising to see how quickly the host figured out how to walk in them. I thought there would be a massive learning curve but he seemed like he was able to hit real streets (with potholes/bad paving) pretty quickly and confidently!
No. There's a lot of climbing up stairs, pulling on things, and stopping quickly to stay out of the way of multi-ton vehicles with dangerous pointy things on the front (forklifts). Your feet hurt enough walking on miles of concrete all day, these would not even pass safety standards, falling is already too much of a hazard to want a fancy roller skate on one's feet.
Am I just cynical or were there some troubling cuts in this video? For example the camera cuts once right before he attempts the stopping distance test, and again right before he goes into a pothole on the street
I noticed that too. Almost no videos of him stopping. Even with a normal "fast walk" pace it can be a problem slowing yourself down on a sidewalk if someone unexpectedly turns or if you didn't see the pile a dog owner (or from a human in SF) didn't pick up in front of you until its too late.
It's also troubling that you have to "signal" the boots to turn into "lock mode" for stairs. Seems like potential for user error there as you have to slow down, then awkwardly turn your foot in just the right way in order to start your ascent on the stairs. To be fair it looks like you wont necessarily slip if you dont engage the "lock mode" but it also seems weird that a lock mode would even be necessary.
Yeah, this seems like something that is cheap and low-tech that does close to the same thing. And a wheel in the heel allows for more control for the wearer with fewer things that can go wrong.
Heelys are fun — I got a pair when my kid got a pair — but they have a couple of drawbacks, they are very fussy about surface quality, not great with slopes, and impose a significant heel, which impacts posture and walking geometry (almost all my other shoes are zero drop, so this is very noticeable to me)
One of the unique beauties of aging is getting to witness the rhyming of history.
~40 years ago it was roller skates
~30 years ago it was roller blades
~20 years ago it was roller shoes
~10 years ago we began to see the wide adoption of battery powered personal transporating devices
sidenote: Anyone else notice the twice mention of Tesla in the promo video?
The mentions of Tesla jumped out at me. It was kind of jarring, since the brand doesn't have the cachet it did only a few months ago. I wonder if they were re-shooting the video today if they'd still mention it.
The mentions to Tesla were off putting to me. It reminded me of when when recruiters try to brag about being founded by ex-Google/Amazon/Microsoft people. If that’s what you choose to sell yourself, imma pass.
I think there are probably warehouse settings where a product like this (assuming it worked) would be valuable. These places are going to be mostly flat predictable floors anyway. If you can reduce the amount of man hours needed that saves on labor as well other health related costs.
Though perhaps by the time tech will work full scale robotics would be able to replace most of these workers anyway.
Way back in the early 80s when I worked in a bicycle store, we used to sell adult tricycles to Air Canada. The aircraft mechanics had a choice between golf carts and tricycles for getting around, but the trikes were popular because so many of them grew overweight and had health issues from being extremely sedentary.
Riding around on a trike let them get across big hangers quickly, carry tools and small parts comfortably, and give them a moderate amount of exercise every day.
Yeah the cut right at 3:58 when he is about to step in to the pothole is pretty suspect. It shows immediately before and immediately after. Can't think of a reason they would cut it that way unless they're intentionally trying not to show it.
Not just the batteries and motors but the controller chips and sensors needed to make the experience smooth… products like these only work if you have a decent microcontroller determining how much power to feed the motor based on minute changes in input and balance.
Compare this to a simple foldable electric scooter. It allows you get to places much faster, and has similar attributes in terms of things you do outside of commuting, is way cheaper and more reliable.
For the hyper-optimization of walking in crowded places at a slightly elevated pace, you basically have to convince someone that spending x amount of money instead of leaving x minutes earlier is worth it, and that x has to be in the range of play money for an average person, because the latter is free.
In general, if you are pushing a product that isn't relying on lifestyle marketing, or isn't radical new technology, the product needs to be an optimization on something existing, and when considering what it optimizes, you need to look at an entire picture, not just the particular item.
I could easily enter public transport with these, that’s not always the case with scooters where I live. Scooters are also quite heavy and can hit things while carrying them around. I don‘t consider scooters suitable for my commute, and they haven’t really gotten the adoption from commuters they should have if they were that good.
Are the spaces tight enough around you where the scooter is inconvenient? I didn't expect e-scooters to become as popular as they did where I live but they've taken the area by storm, and it seems especially strong among the crowd that still commutes.
I see people bring scooters on the train. The issue is people have these huge hulking scooters that they refuse to fold up (not the kind bird uses these things look like they are 50 lbs), so they are standing there holding the handles while 3ish feet of scooter is sitting behind them taking up valuable floor space on the train. Plus it only works with a few people on board, if the entire train of people each had a scooter we'd have to redesign our stations to be way longer to fit the longer trains needed to accomodate all the wasted space. Bikes are the same way on the train honestly: great if you are the only one with a bike, clumsy if you aren't.
My skateboard on the other hand, I just stick it in between my legs and its like its not there.
I'm pretty sure people made the same argument about electric scooters when they first came out. People will buy these just for fun the same way they buy all the other silly modes of transport. Honestly I think these look way more fun than say rollerblades for example. I don't think everyone is going to use them but they will for sure have a market. No sense in being cranky about a cool product just because it doesn't suit your taste or wallet.
Scooters are hard to balance with. I love my e-scooter. My partner has a bad sense of balance and she's fallen off her e-scooter and hurt herself (nothing bad, just bruises and cuts) before. She prefers to ride the bike. According to the video anyway, this looks like it's a lot easier to balance with. Scooters are also heavy. Most men have enough upper body strength to lift scooters, but a lot of others don't. My partner has a hard time lifting up the e-scooter above certain heights.
If they won't let you use a manual scooter I doubt they'd let you use these. The issue is probably that someone would suddenly round a corner and you'd tackle them going at running speed.
A log European cities have banned scooters from the sidewalk. This would not have that limit and would mean less risk than riding with the cars on a scooter.
The price will come down via clone products from overseas manufacturers.
Oftentimes recently it's been the reverse; the well funded product is an expensive clone of a readily available but niche thing that can be bought generic.
I just checked. If you look up "motorized shoes -moonwalker" you'll see lots of designs. It looks like a busy but not well funded market
Perfect example of what should be: show, don't tell
Don't talk to me for 5 minutes about what your shoes do, I know what shoes do. Show me people walking through common obstacles, going around sharp corners, up and down inclines, up and down stairs, and stopping on a dime when need be. All that around 10s of other people both wearing these and normal shoes.
If you can't do that, it's because you can't. Because your product is stupid.
Absolutely. Stopping on a dime is my biggest concern. With a scooter or bike, I can hit the breaks. None of the material covers how to handle emergency situations. The closest is slowing down to walk up stairs
I think these could find a niche in large cities with a lot of tourism. Being able to see twice the city by foot would be incredible when you have limited time on vacation. Many people tried to do this with Segways but it never really took off. This seems a lot better.
Battery life is going to be a very serious limiting factor. It's one thing to walk all day in a new city you are visiting, and think only about recharging yourself. But walking an hour in these, and then carry them (and they should be heavy, relatively speaking) until next charge - I think it would not be worth it.
> Many people tried to do this with Segways but it never really took off
In my experience, this is the only actual use of Segways. I never see Segways used for anything else but city tours. I think maybe some mall security guards sometimes use them too.
These look like they would have the same risks as electric scooters, all while remaining invisible to everyone around you. Hope to be proved wrong but these look like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
The walking motion obviously adds the normal walking speed on top of whatever the motor puts in.
On top of that I bet most of the forward rolling motion actually comes from you yourself putting in force by walking, not from the motor pushing forward. The wheels then just continue coasting. Most likely the motor just providing balance and preventing the wheels from rolling backwards as you push forward, like an advanced version of the under grip on cross-country-skis.
Planting the feet to only rely on motor force would significantly reduce the distance and with both feet next to each other increase the likelihood of face plants when hitting small obstacles.
A 250% increase would then be 6.75 to 10mph, which is a jog to a run.
I wonder how stable these are at speed vs a kick scooter or an electric city bike? At some point, I'd think the larger two-wheeled mobility devices would actually be more stable vs trying to hop from foot-to-foot?
Let me guess: I need to pair it with my phone, create an account, accept a ridiculous EULA that forfeits my right to participate in a class action suit, and update the firmware to add a new mapping feature that tracks my whereabouts (as a feature of course, with a heat map or whatever.)
I feel like these days, when I see a flashy new product, I need to be immediately informed that it doesn't require a smartphone or cloud app. I don't want to be hostage to my fucking shoes because Oracle acquired the company that runs the server for them.
It’s worse. They’ll try to get recurring revenue from what should be a one-off expense for the customer. You’ll be offered personalized coaching. They’ll partner with one of those dieting companies that wants to replace your groceries. God help you if you enable alerts because the app to control the device will hound you endlessly until you sign up.
Imagine if you spent a ton of time and effort to launch a product and people on Hacker News start attacking it brutally based on things that aren't even true.
What a sad sob story. It's so unfortunate for founders that they have to deal with such things as skepticism and preconceived notions.
How about this: if you care about my demographic of people, I'm happy to be appeased to in the form of commitments to have offline-only functionality for the hardware I'm paying for. But if you advertise the 1 millionth tech product and expect me to not assume it is like the 999,999 previous ones out of good faith alone, sorry, I'm fresh out of miniature violins.
I don't really want to be this flippant, but do you know how burned I am by this at this point? I've started returning things based on not being able to use them without an account. Just scroll through Google Home integrations some time and take a look at the vast mountains of internet of shit devices. Sometimes, it's proudly advertised that it needs a smartphone. Other times, you'd be hard pressed to know it even supports it, less requires it. Tooth brushes, bathroom scales, literally anything a Bluetooth radio will fit in.
If you want to be mad at anyone, don't get mad at me. Get mad at Juicero and all of the other folks dropping turds in the proverbial punchbowl. I am not sorry.
It's also unfortunate for the HN community that a bitter, reflexive dismissal with no basis in evidence that pertains to this actual product is the top comment on this story.
So what's the alternative? Just accept it without complaining ever and hope that it gets better, while people leach free advertising for their fresh internet of shit garbage to a hacker community? Why?
If it said something about having open source firmware you could flash yourself, the entire premise would be different. Without something like that, this is basically just free advertising.
I agree that it is unfortunate that I need to be bitter about this. Totally. Not our faults though, and again, I provide an out: give me a reason to believe this is different.
Of course it is natural for hacker types to be skeptical and cynical but I swear to God, I just want an inch of confidence. As it stands now I would bet you substantial amounts of money they are planning on putting a Bluetooth radio in the shoe.
> So what's the alternative? Just accept it without complaining ever and hope that it gets better, while people leach free advertising for their fresh internet of shit garbage to a hacker community?
Again, how do you know this product is one of those "internet of shit" ones?
They'll start collecting DNA samples of you from your feet and then create a clone. They'll lure you away on a fraudulent whiteboard coding interview assignment and then insert the clone into your family. When you return, the clone will have you arrested for impersonation and you will spend the rest of your life in Guantanamo while the clone lives your life. At a crucial moment, they will speak a trigger word that will cause the clone to kill the President, who they will then replace with a clone President, who will then use his now vast power to remove max-speed regulations on these devices, allowing them to go up to 10 mph.
This sort of "late-stage capitalism" cynicism used to be concentrated on reddit but is everywhere now. These shoes are extremely technically impressive, highly novel, and very useful, and yet they're still met with a combative dismissiveness even on a site ostensibly dedicated to such things. Sign of the zeitgeist.
I think it's a helpful cynicism. Remember when everyone rushed to 23andMe and those other DNA testing services and only later did we realize this is a new frontier of selling people's data?
its been my experience that aliexpress usually offers a similar product with about 90% of the functionality and often times more features, with no rent-seeking required.
so ill wait for my mega-walker pro's to come out instead i guess.
The exciting part is that 82% of the mega-walker pro's will work great and the rest of them well self-immolate and burn down your garage randomly. Life is an adventure!
Please make the effort to look into it before you post a deriding comment. There's a lot more to them than that and they are actually a very interesting piece of engineering both in hardware and software.
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Ideally the product does well and release a more affordable version later.
I don't have a use for it but there's definitely people this could help..
I'm skeptical Amazon would.
That said, when I lived in Chicago, I used to see a lady who rollerbladed to the office. I am sure you're thinking, "Young techie, jeans & t-shirt", but you'd be wrong. 40's or late 30's, dressed like an exec. Wearing a dress, make-up, string of pearls, with a fancy handbag, nice haircut. I don't think this is a relevant data point (clearly an outlier), I just thought it was awesome and wanted to share.
Having a good amount of reasonably well maintained dedicated bike lanes would have made rollerblading to work a lot easier!
People get creamed on bikes all the time in bike lanes. Pedestrians on the sidewalks and bike paths just don't pay attention to anything other than what is 3-4 feet from them, and are always forcing you to dodge if you have any kind of speed if you're just even jogging.
It's more a cultural problem than a city planning problem. Contrast how seriously bike lanes are treated in (say) Munich, which is very seriously.
I am seeing more and more e-bikes though, which, since you can keep up with traffic relatively well, allow you ride in the car lane under most circumstances. That's what I do, and if some dickhead really feels the need to pass me when I'm going >25mph, I'll give them a wave at the next light. And probably be shot in the chest one of these days.
I used to skateboard from a lot by the Metra station to the office @ State and Madison.
Most fellow commuters I encountered were visibly bothered by sharing the walkways with someone adult-sized traveling 2-3X their speed. I'd expect a similar level of antisocial friction with these shoes.
Though it has been well over a decade since I did that, maybe people have since warmed up to sharing sidewalks with ebikes/scooters by now.
The best thing you could do with an escooter is to do what bike riders do to be safe, which is to take the entire lane. Car's might get pissed and honk when they pass you, but its better to force them to merge into a separate lane to get around you, than to try to squeeze through the same lane you are in and force you into parked cars or the gutter.
Basically I don't think there is any safe and responsible way to use an e-scooter. I don't think they should exist, it's just a bad idea. e-bikes are great though.
I've repeatedly looked for this exact product in the past, "wheel-augmented shoes", for my 10-to-30 minutes travels (to the shop, to the public transportation, to a friend's...). So as anecdata, I would absolutely be interested in this: maybe not at $1400 but I'd certainly pay a few hundreds.
> cultural association of sillyness and the aesthetic disaster that is "rolly-sandals with shoes".
I don't know how many "that's what was said of Airpods" are needed for this argument to die. Actually, I'm much less weirded out by these shoes than I was of airpods, I don't find them silly at all
As to the aesthetics, I'm sure people thought the same of all types of bicycles. Penny-farthings used to be the cultural norm, and people still ride less-common forms like small-wheel and recumbent bicycles.
Apple has always been the exception that proves the rule in the types of cases. Very, very few companies are able to create demand rather than merely satisfying it.
On top of that only experience with Airpods is as the current gen teenage reality blockers and older people screaming through static about how they must have run theirs through the wash.
I actually find them quite attractive as a means to access my local train station: easier to take with me than a bike or kick scooter, apparently much safer than rollerblades or skateboard. Just not for that price, but let's give it a few years to see if it takes on.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32336808
It was in the book of 101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions.
People are really into weird shoes right now (see pretty much all of sneakerhead culture). I could see this taking off if partnered with the right influencer and offered at about $500-$600.
On Chinese knockoffs: yes, this is a danger with nearly any product made today. If they achieve brand prominence then the risk will be mitigated. Their apparent moat seems to be making walking feel natural. This may be temporarily difficult to reverse engineer and give them some lead time.
Edit: In the video, it looks like a heel-up-toe-down motion with your right foot locks and unlocks the wheels.
I'm really skeptical these wouldn't just gum up after a few days.
You get 5 mile range by using them like roller skates, using your own legs to power them. The motors are just to aid in walking up stairs and such.
That is a lot of buzz-words, and sort of hinting at JPL but failing.
At the end of the video, the exploded view shows a crazy gear train, synchronizing those 10 wheels per shoe sounds tough.
The designer did talk about how failures would be very bad (and it sounded like he had experienced plenty of fails with the earlier designs to be speaking from experience) which might be why they are pushing the terminology there.
I can make a very good looking and well designed cake out of human feces, I'd still go for the 100 years old tested and proven brownie recipe that looks like a brick though. No matter how well something is designed, if it's stupid it's stupid
What does "adaptive A.I. drivetrain" mean?
For all that, the person's gait looks strange to me, like they aren't using their muscles normally. Maybe they are focused on landing the skate evenly on the wheels, or not getting off balance? Walking gait involves heel-strike and toe-lift-off phases and I would think if you mess with these they aren't going to feel comfortable after wearing a while.
They don't say if you can sustain that though.
That said, I've seen some articles of high speed video taken of pro race walkers and basically all of them have tiny moments where both feet are off the ground. Just not egregious enough for a referee to detect.
In general, seems like a really contrived sport, but to each his own...
https://youtu.be/JVBN7NAIrfg
That's why the "tank tread" likely wouldn't work here.
That's a 150% increase, not 250% as the Wired video claims in the 1st 30 secs.
It's also troubling that you have to "signal" the boots to turn into "lock mode" for stairs. Seems like potential for user error there as you have to slow down, then awkwardly turn your foot in just the right way in order to start your ascent on the stairs. To be fair it looks like you wont necessarily slip if you dont engage the "lock mode" but it also seems weird that a lock mode would even be necessary.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heelys
~40 years ago it was roller skates ~30 years ago it was roller blades ~20 years ago it was roller shoes ~10 years ago we began to see the wide adoption of battery powered personal transporating devices
sidenote: Anyone else notice the twice mention of Tesla in the promo video?
Price will come down.
- I can think of lots of jobs that employers would love their staff to move faster.
- I like how these could make public transport commuting faster between home and transport and transport and destination.
- I like the way they don’t replace the shoe
Could not imagine workplace lawsuits that will happen when someone falls and alleges shoe was at fault.
Seems cool, not worth the hassle .
Though perhaps by the time tech will work full scale robotics would be able to replace most of these workers anyway.
Riding around on a trike let them get across big hangers quickly, carry tools and small parts comfortably, and give them a moderate amount of exercise every day.
He was impressed with how well they work on bad surfaces.
Objects like this fill lots of niches, and should be exciting even if you aren't the target demographic.
Clever transmissions like this could work in lots of use cases that weren't previously possible.
I hear they're just going to use riding crops instead.
Compare this to a simple foldable electric scooter. It allows you get to places much faster, and has similar attributes in terms of things you do outside of commuting, is way cheaper and more reliable.
For the hyper-optimization of walking in crowded places at a slightly elevated pace, you basically have to convince someone that spending x amount of money instead of leaving x minutes earlier is worth it, and that x has to be in the range of play money for an average person, because the latter is free.
In general, if you are pushing a product that isn't relying on lifestyle marketing, or isn't radical new technology, the product needs to be an optimization on something existing, and when considering what it optimizes, you need to look at an entire picture, not just the particular item.
Are the spaces tight enough around you where the scooter is inconvenient? I didn't expect e-scooters to become as popular as they did where I live but they've taken the area by storm, and it seems especially strong among the crowd that still commutes.
My skateboard on the other hand, I just stick it in between my legs and its like its not there.
Tell Amazon it will make their warehouse workers walk faster? Half joking.
Amazon also mandates anti-slip boots for warehouse workers (and paid for them), and this is literally the contrary of an anti-slip shoe.
Oftentimes recently it's been the reverse; the well funded product is an expensive clone of a readily available but niche thing that can be bought generic.
I just checked. If you look up "motorized shoes -moonwalker" you'll see lots of designs. It looks like a busy but not well funded market
Don't talk to me for 5 minutes about what your shoes do, I know what shoes do. Show me people walking through common obstacles, going around sharp corners, up and down inclines, up and down stairs, and stopping on a dime when need be. All that around 10s of other people both wearing these and normal shoes.
If you can't do that, it's because you can't. Because your product is stupid.
In my experience, this is the only actual use of Segways. I never see Segways used for anything else but city tours. I think maybe some mall security guards sometimes use them too.
Why keep batteries in the shoes instead of a back or fanny pack?
The staggered wheels to handle cracks and bumps without large wheels seems like a good innovation, would they work with unpowered skates?
It sounds like they're using walking speed as a control (walk faster, wheels move faster, walk slower, wheels move slower).
On top of that I bet most of the forward rolling motion actually comes from you yourself putting in force by walking, not from the motor pushing forward. The wheels then just continue coasting. Most likely the motor just providing balance and preventing the wheels from rolling backwards as you push forward, like an advanced version of the under grip on cross-country-skis.
Planting the feet to only rely on motor force would significantly reduce the distance and with both feet next to each other increase the likelihood of face plants when hitting small obstacles.
A 250% increase would then be 6.75 to 10mph, which is a jog to a run.
I wonder how stable these are at speed vs a kick scooter or an electric city bike? At some point, I'd think the larger two-wheeled mobility devices would actually be more stable vs trying to hop from foot-to-foot?
A "becoming healthy" 5k (3.1-2) time is 30 minutes, which puts the runner at more than 6 miles per hour.
A friend of mine is returning to health, and he was winded after a 30 minute walk at 1.8 mph the whole time.
I feel like these days, when I see a flashy new product, I need to be immediately informed that it doesn't require a smartphone or cloud app. I don't want to be hostage to my fucking shoes because Oracle acquired the company that runs the server for them.
Thank you for reading this so that I don't have to. Coaching for walking is an Onion article I swear.
How about this: if you care about my demographic of people, I'm happy to be appeased to in the form of commitments to have offline-only functionality for the hardware I'm paying for. But if you advertise the 1 millionth tech product and expect me to not assume it is like the 999,999 previous ones out of good faith alone, sorry, I'm fresh out of miniature violins.
I don't really want to be this flippant, but do you know how burned I am by this at this point? I've started returning things based on not being able to use them without an account. Just scroll through Google Home integrations some time and take a look at the vast mountains of internet of shit devices. Sometimes, it's proudly advertised that it needs a smartphone. Other times, you'd be hard pressed to know it even supports it, less requires it. Tooth brushes, bathroom scales, literally anything a Bluetooth radio will fit in.
If you want to be mad at anyone, don't get mad at me. Get mad at Juicero and all of the other folks dropping turds in the proverbial punchbowl. I am not sorry.
If it said something about having open source firmware you could flash yourself, the entire premise would be different. Without something like that, this is basically just free advertising.
I agree that it is unfortunate that I need to be bitter about this. Totally. Not our faults though, and again, I provide an out: give me a reason to believe this is different.
Of course it is natural for hacker types to be skeptical and cynical but I swear to God, I just want an inch of confidence. As it stands now I would bet you substantial amounts of money they are planning on putting a Bluetooth radio in the shoe.
Again, how do you know this product is one of those "internet of shit" ones?
It's terrifying.
I wanna know they're not gonna sell my strut
so ill wait for my mega-walker pro's to come out instead i guess.