While I enjoyed the wine, crepes with nutella and croissants, I also stumbled across something neat at the Adidas Store on the Champs-Elysées while I was there. They had what looked like a Gesture Tek installation right in the middle of the store, where you could design your own shoe. These kids ran up to the screen thinking it was a touch screen, a la iphone. They were clearly lacking the appropriate training required to operate such a display! Having come across Gesture Tek displays before in our multimedia pioneering class, I decided to put on a clinic. It was funny seeing people stop in their tracks while I created my own personalized Toronto Raptors sneaker, using a user interface that screamed Minority Report. After you create your shoe, you could save it in a gallery and walk over to a “virtual mirror” and see what it looks like on your foot. Unfortunately, the “virtual mirror” was broken, so I only got to play with the interface. Thank you to my wonderful girlfriend Kerrie who filmed me looking like a dork.

Adidas Paris – Shoe Designer with Gesture Tek Interface from insultcomicdog on Vimeo.

I’m already thinking of ways to port this over to a Papervision 3D project using Dan Zen’s motion cursor classes as a user interface. You have already seen examples of the motion cursor classes used in Rock Revolution a project I built with my classmate Nick Poison. I don’t think motion cursors have been implemented with Papervision 3D yet, so hopefully I’ll come up with something neat.