These Projector Shoes Make L.A. Lights Look Quaint
Remember those L.A. Lights LED shoes from the ‘90s? Well, Chen Liang’s Footstep Magic project is even better.
We ‘90s kids grew up with some pretty iconic toys and fashion, but one of the most “of the era” trends were light-up sneakers. L.A. Lights kicked things off and it wasn’t long before the coolest thing your shoes could do was blink with every footstep. At a time when LEDs were still fairly exciting technology, that felt like living in a sci-fi movie. Today, however, it is trivial to cram a battery and some cheap LEDs in the soles of some tennis shoes and therefore the allure is gone. That’s why 陳亮 (Chen Liang) brought the concept into the modern era with his Footstep Magic project.
Footstep Magic is a wearable device, strapped to the user’s ankle, that projects an image down onto the ground in front of the user’s foot when they take a step. It is like an L.A. Lights sneaker, but much more impressive. The projected image can be anything, even short videos. Chen chose a very short clip of a snowflake that expands in order to create the illusion of a crystal growing on the ground with each footstep, but the only limit is your own imagination.
The projector Chen used is incredibly simple—really just a light source with a lens and a slot where the user can place a static transparency image. Chen then converted that into what is essentially a miniature LCD projector. He did so by using a LILYGO T-QT Pro, which is an ESP32S3-based development board that comes with a small LCD that has a resolution of 128×128 pixels.
You can’t just put a normal LCD in front of a bright light to make a projector, because the LCD will already have its own backlight panel. But if you remove that backlight, as Chen did, you’ll get a transparent LCD. With that in place of the original static transparency images, Chen had a digital projector capable of projecting whatever he shows on the screen.
Chen attached that DIY LCD projector onto a shin guard, with power coming from a 502025 LiPo battery. A vibration sensor detects firm footsteps, which tells the ESP32 to turn on the projector and play the snowflake video clip. The projector’s LED light source can get pretty hot, so Chen recommends adding a heat sink if running the projector for any extended period of time.
It has been about 30 years since the heyday of L.A. Lights and we think the world is now ready for Footstep Magic.