The Kartel has an interesting article on the upcoming “augmented reality” shoe from Adidas. As ridiculous as that sounds, it really is true. Later this year, Adidas will release a line of shoes with some sort of barcode built into the shoe. When scanned by your webcam at the Adidas website, you will then be able to “jump into a virtual version of the Adidas Originals Neighborhood, and interact with stuff.” Here’s the crazy part: you will continue to hold your shoe up in front of the webcam and use it as the controller to… well, I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. Kudos to Adidas for branching out and trying something different, but I don’t really fancy holding my shoe out in front of my face and dangling it around just so I can explore a virtual neighborhood. Hopefully it will wind up actually being somewhat interesting and Adidas won’t lose all the geek-cred they gathered up last week when they introduced their other new line of shoes.
