I don’t know how this age we’re living through will ultimately be designated — we’ve used up banners like Ice Age, Stone Age, Iron Age and Industrial Age — if anybody asked me, I would nominate The Age of Insulation.
We insulate ourselves from what’s left of the world around us. Modern homes don’t worry about windows anymore — they have Home Entertainment Centres.
Our vehicles sport screens and sound systems, ensuring we don’t have to look at — you know — scenery. And there are GPS systems to save us the bother of ever being lost.
Should we be forced to venture out of our cars and houses we have “smart” watches to keep us plugged in — even Google glasses that allow us to record what we encounter.
And now the latest bit of technological insulating innovation: allow me to introduce you to the smartshoe.
No, this isn’t April Fools. No, I am not making this up. It is the brainchild of a company in India called Ducere Technology. It is a wireless-enabled shoe that takes the thinking out of walking.
They call it the Lechal shoe, ‘lechal’ being a Hindu word for ‘take me along.’ It’s a vampy, futuristic-looking piece of footwear. It looks like a miniature suede Ferrari crossed with a slipper that Aladdin might wear.
It has sensors in the insole that make it capable of sending and receiving Bluetooth signals. This allows the Lechal-shod to sync up with their smart phones thereby hooking up to Google Maps.
At this point, the wearer can cease thinking. The shoes ‘direct’ you. Vibrations in the left shoe; take a left. A tingle in the right toes; hang a right. Oh — and if you walk too slowly, the shoes will ‘buzz’ in unison. Pick it up, slowpoke.
I hear you. You’re asking who, aside from the terminally bored, would want a pair of Lechals?
Well, joggers, maybe. The shoes can be programmed to record distance traveled and calories burned.
But actually the makers think every one of us could benefit from donning a pair of Lechals.
That way, a spokesman says, walkers “can plug in their destinations and not have to stop to check their phones as they walk.”
Here’s a news alert for the folks at Ducere Technologies: I don’t check my smartphone when I take a walk. (As a matter of fact I don’t own a smartphone, but that’s another story.)
I think we need more, not less unguided walking in our lives.
I subscribe to the words of an old French novelist named Anatole France, who, a century or so ago, wrote: “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”
Tolkien said it shorter and better: “All that glitters is not gold; all who wander are not lost.”
— Arthur Black lives on Saltspring Island. His column appears every Tuesday in The NEWS. E-mail: arblack43@shaw.ca.
