At New Balance’s sports research lab in Boston, there is a humanoid robot that actually sweats and breathes. Andi is his name and the more the temperature and humidity in his environmental chamber goes up, the more his heat sensors twitch and the 150 pores on his body become moist. It amounts to $500,000 worth of kit, and the idea is it will make sportswear that evaporates sweat and cools the body faster without putting humans at risk. Yet, incredibly, Andi isn’t even the most cutting edge piece of tech in the building.
Next door is the slam lab, where the special foam and carbon plate in New Balance’s world record-breaking super spike, the FuelCell MD-X v3, has been formulated, pounded, given life. A few metres away is a running lane with force plates and motion cameras, which not only captures an athlete’s skeleton digitally in real time, but the forces going through their bodies when they test the spikes.
