Microblogging Sneakers Tweet Every Step You Take

Microblogging Sneaker

We've had plants that tweet ; unborn babies that tweet ; and even our power consumption can be tweeted.

Rambler, developed by Ricardo Nascimento and Tiago Martins, is the latest object that has been imbued with the potent power to tweet. It is a pair of ordinary sneakers embedded with a sensor that detects when the wearer is walking. Literally every step you take is tweeted as the word "tap" or symbol "." depending on the pressure of each step. If you want to follow Rambler, here is a link to Rambler's Twitter account.

The project itself is a cheeky criticism of the desire to share mundane and "useless" information in the tweetosphere.

Personally I kinda wish my shoes would guilt tweet me into getting up from my desk more often throughout the day. "syuzi hasn't left her computer in 5 hours…" Hmm… it might work…

Tags: Fashion and Technology, Social Networking

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Comment by Rebecca Grabman on January 13, 2010 at 12:56am: You might find that the wearer has been inadvertently writing out all kinds of offensive things! ;D

Morse code letters are represented by between one and four tones in length so "translating" the tweets would take a while (unless you wrote a program to do it for you, of course), but randomly spacing them turn the 9:25 tweet into "ANTS DE TEA TAG AMIMOE WMSB". Hm, yeah, not high poetry.

Comment by ricardo O'Nascimento on January 12, 2010 at 11:42pm: Thanks Syuzi and Interesting rebecca. We thought about the relation with morse code after we saw the posts... I think yes, it could be translated but the wearer has to learn how to "write" with his feet. That sounds interesting... imagine a step dance show in morse code ;-)

Comment by Rebecca Grabman on January 12, 2010 at 10:57pm: The real question is if the taps and stops can be translated via Morse Code.

Comment by Syuzi on January 12, 2010 at 3:32pm: Thanks Ricardo. I'll make the correction above.

Comment by ricardo O'Nascimento on January 12, 2010 at 1:02pm: This project was developed also by Tiago Martins.