Empowering widespread shoe personalization via a 3D foot scanning App

Unceasing market request for personalization of consumer goods calls for more and more flexible production technologies, and for increasingly reliable means to gather precise pictures of what each customer desires. Fitting is especially crucial to accomplish personalization in footwear, where the prevailing of manual operations makes production flexibility quite easy, but the close interaction between shoe and foot requires extremely precise knowledge of the body part which is being gloved. In a still ongoing research project, the authors are developing a powerful smartphone App to perform a 3D scanning of a foot, whose preliminarily registered performances are here presented and discussed. The solution is expected to establish a new standpoint in the trade-off between the level of precision of the gathered data and the ubiquity and accessibility of the scanning functionality, thus empowering a widespread best-matched fit personalization in the footwear market.