Your Next Pair Of Shoes Could Come From A 3D Printer

The assembly line at Feetz has 100 humming 3-D printers. Their sole purpose is to make shoes. Each printer is named after a cartoon character: Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo. Though whimsical, the printers are out to upend mass retailing by making every shoe to order, cheaply. Each printer can be reset to make different sixes and takes up to 12 hours to make a pair. Ordering is done online, where customers can download an app, take smartphone snapshots of their feet and create a 3-D model. Shoes, which cost $199 are made of recycled material and are thickly padded for comfort.

With the rise of new technologies like smartphones and 3D printers, fashion start ups like Feetz are changing the ways goods are ordered, made and sold. Traditionally, manufacturing is the most expensive part of the retail supply chain. Creating foods in small batches is difficult and costly. Most are manufactured overseas, and shipping goods to the US adds time and cost to the process. The beauty of instant, customized fashion is that goods can be made at lower cost and more quickly – in a personalized style. These are still early days for 3D printing. The offerings are not very diversified, and they are limited to basic goods.

Soon, Shades To Help Record What You See

Messaging service Snapchat announced on 24 September it will launch a line of video catching sunglasses, a spin on Google’s “Glass” abandoned by the technology giant a year ago. The California based company, which also announced it is changing its name to Snap Inc, said its ‘Spectacles’ will be “available soon”. They’ve been working for the past few years to develop a totally new type of camera. The sunglasses will come with an integrated video camera that will make it easy to create ‘Memories’.

Earlier this year, Snap added a way to save images as “Memories”, a shift for a service known for messages that disappear after being viewed. Spectacles if billed to have one of the smallest wireless cameras in the world, capable of capturing a day’s worth of “Snaps” on a single charge. The sunglasses will connect to Snap software wirelessly using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections. The camera on the sunglasses will record video from the perspective of wearers, boasting of a 115 degree field of view, and can also capture video snippets intended for sharing at the service.

Spectacles would put pressure on GoPro, whose mini-cameras are designed to let people capture video of endeavors from personal perspectives. Last year, Google halted sales of its internet linked eyewear Glass following criticism about privacy since the device was capable of capturing pictures and video. Glass connected to the internet using Wi-Fi hot-spots or more typically, by being wirelessly tethered to mobile phones.

New Method To Aid Burn Victims Grow New Skin

Researchers have developed a novel method that measures the limit to which human skin can be stretched, an advance that could help grow new skin for burn victims. Surgeons use various techniques for tissue expansion procedures designed to grow skin in one region of the body to graft it on to another site (sometimes used for burn victims). This procedure stretches the skin, typically, by inflating a balloon with air or silicone under the surface. Skin grows more in regions where it is stretched – during pregnancy, for instance – but stretch it too much and the tissue might break. The new predictive technique could be employed as a method of predicting the limit to which the skin could be stretched. The outermost layer of skin, the stratum corneum, regulates water loss from the body and protects underlying living tissue from germs and the environment, in general. It is pretty tough, protecting the body from extreme temperatures, rough surfaces, and most paper edges. The results could help create new topical medical and cosmetic products.

Holographic TV Next Big Thing

A research team at the BBC has been working on an incredible new ‘holographic TV’ – and they have already produced some stunning results. The experiment brief was to invent a device using low-fi and low-cost materials that could be used to completely change our way of viewing the small screen. The team admitted that they had seen the phenomenon of a holographic image created by people using their mobile phones, but they wanted to extend the scale and go one step bigger. People had created small ‘holographic’ displays using mobile phones and so it occurred to researchers making a super siz

ed version of these low-cost displays would give them a way to see how ‘holograms’ might work on a larger scale, something comparable to the size of a living room TV, they took a 46” TV that they had in their office and then asked a local plastics cutter to make a simple acrylic pyramid shape based on some sketches that they had done. By placing this acrylic pyramid on their flat screen TV, they were able to try out a modern-day version of an Old Victorian Theater technique and created the illusion of floating ‘holographic’ like images. The team then used archive footage from the BBC to view images in stunning 3D. However, don’t expect to see a holographic TV in the shops any time soon.