An interactive computer graphics system for the design of molded and orthopedic shoe lasts

The Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, with support from the Department of Veterans Affairs and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center, has developed an interactive graphics program for the development of shoe lasts from digitized images of feet or digitized images of commercial shoe lasts. The program runs on a Sun 3/260 computer with a TAAC-1 graphics accelerator. The program contains operations for region addition and deletion, techniques for narrowing the ankle area, methods for toe extension, operations to allow for shoe inserts, etc. Once the operations by the user are complete, the program will resample the resulting last in a 512 x 512 array. The user is then allowed to select an error tolerance which will guide a data reduction program to represent the last as Coons patches. These patches are then transmitted to a milling machine which will cut the last.