Shoes by Dominic Wilcox

There's No Place Like Home...

Inspired by the film The Wizard of Oz, designer Dominic Wilcox has created a pair of GPS-enabled shoes he calls No Place Like Home.

The shoes look relatively traditional on the outside but they hide some amazing wizardry and wonderment beneath. Hidden within the sole and heel of the shoe are LED's and a GPS system that will lead the wearer to any location they would like on Earth! Once a destination is uploaded to the shoes via a USB cable, a discreet array of tiny LED lights on the toe of the left shoe indicates the direction in which you need to head, and a similar display on the right toe shows the percentage of your journey that remains. The GPS antenna is hidden within a fabric tab at the back of the shoe.

The shoe is made from leather a micro-processor, GPS and LEDs. The left shoe points in the desired direction, the right shoe acts as a progress bar. The design of the shoes take the best of traditional craftsmanship and enhances the traditional brogue shoe hole perforations.

“I was commissioned by the Global Footprint project in Northamptonshire, a place famous for shoe making, to create some shoes. I decided to make a pair of shoes that can navigate you to anywhere you wish to travel to. I thought about the Wizard of Oz and how Dorothy could click her shoes together to go home. After uploading your required destination to the shoes via a piece of custom made mapping software and a USB cable, the GPS, which is embedded in the heel, is activated by a heel click. It then communicates to the wearer via a ring of LED lights to point in the required direction. The shoe with the GPS wirelessly communicates with the right shoe that has a progress bar of lights to show how close you are to the destination.

In developing these shoes I tried different methods of communicating the direction of travel to the wearer, including vibration, though they just tickled my feet uncomfortably. The simplest and most effective method was to add a circle of mini LED lights that the wearer can just glance down at.” -Dominic Wilcox via DominicWilcox.com

A SCARY INSIGHT ALERT

In the three years to 1991, the proportion of children under 10 walking to school in Britain was 62 per cent, but this has dropped to less than half. By contrast, the proportion of children travelling to school by car has increased to over 40 per cent – a change only partly explained by an average distance to school that has increased from 1.3 miles in 1995–97 to 1.6 miles in 2008.