Sports are getting smarter, from the ground up with smartphone-enabled golf shoes to a football that watches your every move.
Salted Venture, a Samsung Electronics spinoff, has offered up its smart golf shoes with the help of Kickstarter. First announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, the IOFIT smart shoes are designed to give both athletes and coaches data on the player’s performance.
“There’s so much valuable information coming from our feet, and it’s being wasted,” Salted Venture CEO Jacob Cho said in a statement when the shoe was first announced.
The shoe is aimed at anyone looking to get insight into their balance and coordination, but the primary target is golfers. The shoe is embedded with sensors that offer insights in real-time including the amount of force on various parts of the foot – which lets users visualize where the balance, center of gravity and weight shift are happening, helping athletes understand what’s going right or wrong with their golf swing. The data can be streamed directly to the companion app on either a tablet or smartphone.
IOFIT will ship in February 2017 and will cost early backers $189. The shoes were a huge success on Kickstarter, surpassing its $30,000 goal by more than $21,000 within the first week.
In other connected sports news, sports gear company Wilson just announced the Wilson X Connected Football, the first “smart” football available, that uses a pair of sensors that the you how far, fast and efficiently you through the ball. Using two offset accelerometers that act as a gyroscope, the Wilson X measures the speed, spin, and spiral of each toss and sends that data to a connected iOS app via Bluetooth. Not only does the app give feedback on throwing performance, it also features games to play one on one with the ball or leaderboards for competing with friends. Games include augmented-reality drills narrated by sportscaster Gus Johnson. The website bills it "like playing a video game with a football in your hand.”
The smart football, which will start shipping in September, retails at $200, double the price of an official NFL football. After 200,000 throws, the football also loses its mind — its smart capabilities are exhausted, and it reverts to a regular old dumb football.