Latest Invention: Sprint Shoes Made Using 3D Printing Technology

Luc Fusaro is a French designer who was able to create lightweight sprint shoes using 3D printing technology. The latter allows the designer to create customized shoes for each athlete in part.

It would be interesting to note that Fusaro's sprint shoes are part of his final master degree solo project that he worked on at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.

Prior to creating the actual shoes, the designer scanned the athletes' feet in order to generate a digital 3D model. He then designed soles of different degree of stiffness and then used 3D printing technique to create the physical item out of sintered nylon polymide powder.

The next step involved testing different soles in the lab. He thus was able to adjust the mechanical peculiarities of the shoe to physical abilities of each athlete. Afterwards the designer once again made use of additive manufacturing procedure to make the final athlete-specific prototype shoe that weights just 96 grams (3.4 oz).

According to Fusaro, his technology allows making shoes that could improve an athlete's performance by up to 3.5%.

Check out the video below to see the process of making 3D printed shoes.

[via Luc Fasaro]