While at Wieden+Kennedy, I was a key contributor to the Nike Live Design project, which was subsequently showcased at New York Fashion Week. The project represented a transformative approach to footwear design, fundamentally reimagining the traditional boundaries between digital design conceptualization and physical shoe fabrication.
Traditionally, the shoe design process is extensively time-consuming, with the journey from initial mockup to a physical prototype often spanning weeks or even months. The Nike Live Design project disrupted this paradigm by developing a technological solution capable of fabricating custom shoes within a single hour.
This project had extensive involvement with Nike, as it would allow designers and customers to view their custom-colored shoes in real time. The core technical challenges of the project was to create a seamless, real-time customization experience that would:
- Track user movements in real-time and project designs onto the Nike shoe
- Render design modifications instantly
- Provide a responsive and intuitive interface
- Ensure minimal latency between user actions and visual feedback
As the lead frontend developer, I architected a React frontend web app that users would interact with on an iPad to choose designs and make modifications on their custom shoes. In order for the web app to integrate with the projecting software, I developed a low latency Node.js websocket API server that would subscribe to the iPad and than publish commands to the C++ 3D projecting service. This allowed a real time seamless experience of customers seeing the changes on their shoes in real time.
