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LED Good Shoes Turn Your Dance Right Into A Light Show

They're like those light-up sneakers that you had while you had been a child -- the ones that blink and flash, activated by the pressure of your tread -- but they're also 2.0 % cooler than that. Orphe, developed by Japanese startup No New Folk Studio and at the moment seeking Indiegogo backers, is a programmable efficiency shoe fitted with a hundred full-color, serially controlled LEDs, advanced movement sensors and a wi-fi Bluetooth module -- designed to boost and become part of your dance moves.

The LEDs, designed to permit users to map interactions between light, motion and sound, http://www.edm-swag.myshopify.com/ might be controlled in two ways: firstly, through a linked app that communicates with the shoes via Bluetooth; and secondly, the consumer can use the app to program the shoes to reply a certain approach to the wearer's movements.

"Orphe's lights can be set to vary together with the speed and orientation of a dancer's actions, allowing for varied types of expression and performance -- giving motion an 'aura', for example, or making a design using after-photos," No New People wrote.

"The 9-axis sensors embedded in every sole pick up the actions of every shoe in real time. This data can then be used to wirelessly control numerous external devices, permitting the shoes to operate as musical devices, video game controllers, foot switches, etc."

What No New People hopes is that customers will design their own macros and share them with a group to develop the best way the sneakers are used, inspired by the hardware, its functions and each other.

"More than cash ... what we'd like are individuals who will join us in creating with new forms of inventive expression using these instruments," the crew wrote. "We hope that with the participation of a various range of individuals concerned within the creation of expressive artwork, together with not only dancers and musicians but additionally builders and designers, our know-how can result in the emergence of a very new culture of audiovisual expression."

The sneakers -- which were developed with the help of a conventional shoemaker to beat the challenges of integrating footwear and electronics, and come in plain black and plain white to let the LEDs shine to their greatest effect -- every include a small unified circuitboard with an ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor, an InvenSense MPU-9150 9-axis motion-tracking system, a BLE wi-fi module and a charging circuit, in addition to the excessive-density LED strip around the sole.

They will also be used with the free iOS app that the studio has developed, and the crew hopes to release an SDK so that customers can create their own software.

The shows are at the moment being offered as a reward for an early chicken pledge of $2.0 (about AU$355, £180), after which they will be $330 (about AU$435, £225) a pair, with an estimated delivery in December. Head over to the Orphe Indiegogo page to check them out.