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Nike use IRIS Explorer™ to produce hi-tech footwear

The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) is pleased to announce that their flexible and powerful computer visualization software, IRIS Explorer, is helping a world-famous sports and fitness company, NIKE Inc. NIKE's 'R&D SWAT Team' look for technological developments that can take it into the future with improved products and processes. IRIS Explorer's task at NIKE includes smooth, accurate, and fast visualization of 300,000 data points from foot scans to help the company get a better understanding of what the internal shape of the shoe should be.

Mark Johnston (Project Manager, Advanced R&D) and his Footware Design and Development Group in Beaverton, Oregon are carrying out a corporate mandate to study promising technologies and major product opportunities at NIKE, Inc. "We evaluate everything," Johnston says of his cross-functional team of computer programmers, biomechanics experts, and mechanical engineers. "The department looks at all opportunities from low-level technologies - computer tools that could help us design products faster to meet the needs of the individual - to new systems for how to fit a shoe."

Designing a shoe means creating various components - the outsole, midsole, and upper - and then fitting these components around a foot support unit called the last. Johnston and his team are interested in understanding and perfecting this shape which represents the internal volume of the shoe.

"We involve IRIS Explorer in two very important aspects of our research," he says. "The first is for rapid application prototyping. When we want to try to test a new analysis algorithm - or if we simply want to do ‘what if’ experiments - IRIS Explorer gives us a fast and flexible way to pull together prototype code. The low programming overhead associated with IRIS Explorer is a big advantage to us. To a large degree, understanding our analysis results and the morphology of the foot requires fast and accurate visualization, and this is where IRIS Explorer delivers the second big benefit. Whether our data is from a laser scanner or a touch probe, IRIS Explorer consistently handles any dataset."

Part of the uniqueness of Johnston’s task is that there are very few computer visualization tools that can do the same functions that the team asks IRIS Explorer to do. The problem, as he describes it, is that off-the-shelf tools expect to see fairly regular shapes and datasets. Feet, however, are amorphous, and they generally break the rules or assumptions that are made by mechanical engineering and CAD packages. IRIS Explorer has the flexibility to do such sophisticated analyses: “IRIS Explorer visualizes, renders and rotates our data just that way.”

For the full case story of how NIKE has improved their technology see http://www.nag.co.uk/visual/IE/iecbb/Posters/Index.asp
7th January 2000.

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© The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd, Oxford UK, 1999