If the Shoe Fits.

Custom shoes put technology through its paces

Mass production was a dream come true for both manufacturers and consumers, as an abundance of lower priced goods flooded the marketplace. Yet one particular by-product of this industrial revolution became quite constraining for buyers--standard-size clothing. Today, digital scanning and 3D modeling technologies are bringing the custom fit back into vogue, and one company taking advantage of this trend is French shoemaker J.M. Weston.

Weston is considered an international standard-setter for quality shoes. The company's oxfords and slip-ons, made from fine leather, cost from $375 to $800 on average, and are available in sizes and half-sizes with a five-width range. Although the 130-year-old company moved to a modern factory in 1990, it still employs traditional shoemakers who finish each shoe by hand. But the ultimate luxury when it comes to a pair of shoes is a perfect fit. So the company has developed Visionique, a foot-scanning system that marries high technology with handmade craftsmanship to add accuracy and speed to the creation of a custom-fitted, hand-finished shoe.

Weston's scanner contains four synchronized Kreon Laser Sensors from Kreon Industries (Limoges, France) that can precisely measure a person's foot in 18 seconds. Each sensor has two CCD (chargecoupled device) cameras that produce data points of the foot. The system captures these points using triangulation--with two sensors scanning the foot from above and two from below--resulting in a 3D point cloud. Incorporated into the technology is software customized by Weston that automatically produces the point-cloud data in real time, within a precision of 0.3mm. Because the Kreon technology was developed for reverse engineering, primarily within the automotive industry, Weston needed to create the software with specific functions such as the automatic calculation of certain foot measurements.

Once the scanning process is completed, each customer's foot measurements are stored in an Oracle database, eliminating the need for repeated scanning when the customer orders a new pair of custom-fit shoes.

One of the challenges to scanning a foot is capturing its ...