Years of experimenting with augmented reality has paid off for footwear maker Nike Inc. with the company’s release of Nike Fit, an AR app that helps customers make sure they get properly sized shoes.

Announced today by the athletic-shoe maker, Nike Fit is a special measuring solution built directly into the company’s mobile app that uses a phone’s camera to scan feet. It uses a combination of computer vision, machine learning, data science, artificial intelligence and recommendation algorithms to come up with a “best fit” for shoes.

Of course, the app is also loaded with an entire library of Nike’s shoe styles and designs to offer the customer after a good fit is determined — meaning that the app can also determine the best fit for a customer within the type of shoe desired.

In the short term, the company said, Nike Fit is intended to improve the way Nike designs, manufactures and sells shoes so they’re better-tailored to consumer needs. But other benefits of a more accurate fit include fewer returns and better performance. As the company put it: “No number, no gender, just your name and a custom-made pair of shoes.”

According to the company, poor fit in shoes is basically an epidemic globally: It’s estimated that more than 60% of all people are walking around in ill-fitting shoes and a half-million people in North America alone complain about purchasing the wrong size shoe.

Wearing the wrong size of shoe can also be bad for a person’s foot health. A solid pair of properly sized shoes will help absorb the impact of the entire body weight when walking and reduce the stress on the metatarsals, the bones that make up the length of the foot. Properly fit shoes can also reduce the formation of calluses and corns as well as bunions, a bony growth on the side of the toe worsened by narrow or pinched shoes.

To make its sizing work, the Nike Fit app collects 13 data points mapping out the contours and morphology of both feet. The company calls this a “hyper accurate” measurement. It’s stored in a profile for the user on NikePlus, the company’s database of customer preferences, for use in future purchases.

Most AR apps for phones work by overlaying images or data over the user’s vision. This is useful for the fashion industry because it can show a customer wearing a new shirt or display what glasses might look like on their face, such as Warby Parker Retail Inc.’s virtual try-on. There are also AR apps that allow users to measure spaces, which is what Nike’s app does for feet, such as Measure for iOS.

The release of the feet scanning app follows the acquisition of Israeli fashion and body scanning firm Invertex last year. Nike incorporated the company’s artificial intelligence and digital capabilities including a technology known as FootID. Invertex’s FootID does the heavy lifting of scanning, categorizing and sizing feet so that the data can be sent to a mobile phone to assist with the purchase of shoes.

The Nike app currently has Nike Fit active and is available for Android and iOS today.

Photo: Pixabay