Portland (the one in Oregon) is the shoe capital of the United States. Nike is headquartered here, Adidas calls Portland home, and Under Armor just moved to town. In this hotbed of shoe design, a three-person startup is attempting to reboot our perception of adventure footwear.
In this episode of Innovators, we go behind the scenes of Objective Virtues Inc., also known as OB/VS or Obvious Footwear. Founder Kelly Dachtler leads a team of designers and athletic footwear experts as they prototype and prepare to launch a one-of-a-kind shoe, the ADPT, or Adapt.
The OB/VS ADPT is the world’s first climate-adaptable sneaker system. Designed to be at home in the snow and cold, or on hot dusty summer hikes, the ADPT is unlike any other shoe.
The liner is a waterproof moccasin made from merino wool that’s designed to provide warmth and comfort. It’s essentially a compression sock that by itself is great for lounging by the campfire.
The outer sneaker is lightweight and features hydrophobic nanomaterials making it waterproof and highly breathable. The midsole is large and angular, with proprietary air cooling and drainage channels.
Combining the two creates a warm, supportive and rugged heavy sneaker made to go anywhere.
It’s been a two-and-a-half-year journey for OB/VS to create the ADPT. While the initial concept of an all-condition modular shoe with air cooling has remained constant, the choice of the materials used has evolved. The team combined natural materials like merino wool with technologies typically found in rugged outerwear like membrane fabrics with nanocoatings.
Much of the design work can happen in 3D renderings and computer models, but to really know how the shoe feels and performs, Dachtler and his team turn to rapid prototyping. Getting hands on with the material to know how it feels and performs in the real world is essential.
The challenge now for Obvious Footwear is to make the benefits of the Adapt more obvious to everyone. In the end, success for the Adapt will be measured not merely by the number of shoes sold. More important is whether this innovation catches on and changes the perception of what footwear can be.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.