Put meteorites on your feet and dance with the stars
Designers create a pair of crazy-looking space-inspired shoes by taking 3D scans of real meteorites at the Natural History Museum in London.
The best possible footwear for a nice constitutional moonwalk? It's probably space boots, but if you want to go in style, meteorites are the way to go.
Inspired by the Rosetta landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the team at Studio Swine -- architect Asuza Murakami and artist Alexander Groves -- have designed a pair of shoes modelled after real meteorites.
The pair were admitted to the vault of London's Natural History Museum, which houses one of the world's finest meteorite collections. There, they used 3D scanners to create models of some of the meteorites. These scans then formed the basis for 3D modelling the shoes.
The shoes themselves were crafted from aluminium foam -- more commonly used inside cars and buildings as sound insulation -- using CNC milling, and lined with soft Italian leather.
"The foam is 90 percent air, lightweight yet robust, and efficient at creating volume with very little material, which created the sense of large rocks floating in space," Swine wrote.
"Whilst the metal is in a molten state, gassing agents are injected, creating a pumice-like material full of thousands of irregular cells. It's a spectacular example of how industry and natural forces can merge to emit a beautiful material."
If you want a pair of your very own, though, you might have to get to a museum and start scanning: this project was a one-off concept created for Microsoft to promote the Surface Pro 3, with the sole brief being that the tablet computer had to be employed at some point during the process.
You can check out more pictures of the shoes on the official web page.