Sound Proof Black Panther Shoes Made From Aerogel - Retractable Nanotech Sneakers

This video is sponsored by Brilliant. So I've been seeing this comment everywhere. Make the soundproof boots from the Black Panther. And you know the rules. If enough of you want it, I'll build it. So please go ahead and drop your build ideas down below for what I should make next. And also like the ones you think are cool so we can get another idea that y'all are excited about like this one. And if you end up enjoying this video, toss it a like and subscribe if you want. All right, so here's the clip of the Black Panther shoes. By the way, RIP Chadwick Boseman. Just a phenomenal actor and such an inspiration. Try them on. So as we see, the shoes start out just as soles. But when you step on them, they expand with this really cool glitch style nanoparticles to surround the foot and create a shoe. And it looks super sick too, but come on Marvel, what's wrong with laces? Oh well. But the important part is the soundproofing. As Shuri says, I made them completely sound absorbent. All right, so the checklist. We're gonna make these shoes automatically appear on your foot from the sole of the shoe and make them sound absorbent. And you know, probably throw in some Black Panther claws for good measure. Should be fun. So to make sound absorbent shoes, we kind of have to understand what sound actually is. So to keep things interesting, I'm gonna be using this boom device from my last video. Basically a CO2 canister inside a pressure chamber with some paint powder inside. So all we gotta do, pull the pin, CO2 pops. Yeah, now we probably should run. So as you might know, sound is just the difference in air pressure. So when the CO2 pressure is high enough, the shell breaks rapidly. This causes a sudden high pressure area which slams into the surrounding air, which slams into more surrounding air. And we'll get a nice pressure wave that expands outwards, losing a bit of energy with each collision, of course. And this makes up the sound we hear, which is why the further away we are, the quieter it sounds. And like super slow-mo stuff, you can actually see the pressure wave because the refraction index of the compressed air is different than the surrounding air. My camera's not quite fast enough to pick that up, but the powder paint kind of gives you an idea of the expansion. Thank you, glass that is all. Please do the reading for Monday. Hey, who's talking? Get back to work. The same thing happens when you take a step just at lower volume. So the goal is to stop that pressure wave from reaching an ear one way or another. When you take a step, there's a few sounds we gotta think about. First, you have the initial impact sound that you would expect, but then you also have reverberations from the deformation of the material you're walking on, like a creaking floor, for example. Now that part would be super hard to control, but thankfully, the movie actually said sound absorbent. Completely sound absorbent. And if you listen closely, you can actually hear some slight reverberations when he's moving his feet. So I think we dodged that bullet. Finally, Marvel's using some physics for once. Yeah, nevermind. All right, so the goal is not to have sound created by the shoe reach the ear of a listener. If we're assuming the listener is a human, then we only care about sounds from the 20 to 20,000 Hertz range. So you can reflect sound, which is more like soundproofing. You can absorb the sound, which is what they said in the movies. And you can also cancel out the sound with other sound through active noise cancellation, or you could just not make the sound at all. And I don't think reflections are gonna help as much here. So let's start with absorption. So you can think of this as like throwing a rubber ball at concrete versus a pillow. Pillow's gonna stop it by absorbing the impact, while the concrete is gonna bounce it back. And remember, we want that ball stopped, because if it reaches an ear, they're gonna know something's up. So since sound travels through air for our purposes, you know, we're not fish, we want a material that lets air in, but then traps it. So maybe slightly porous, but not so much so that it just lets air right through. So I hopped online and ordered a bunch of stuff that I thought might work. We got foam, acoustic sound panels, leather, rock wool, socks, bare feet, and some special pads for your feet that supposedly help you walk quieter. And I also got a decibel meter so we can more accurately track the sound levels. So for a control, we got some regular Air Force One shoes. And then we can see which material actually makes these quieter. But you know, I feel like these shoes just aren't Black Panther enough for this video. So let's fix that. Yup, that's better. We got the Black Panther on one side, and then I did sort of this like claw gash mark thing on the other with the Nike Swish. I think they came out pretty good. So we're gonna attach all the different materials to the sole of the shoe to see which one makes it the quietest. But you know what? I'm actually gonna give these away. If you want them, I guess just like and subscribe, of course, and then hop on over to my Instagram, and then like the picture that I post of these so I can pick a winner. So I'm doing this experiment on concrete to eliminate any potential floor noise. I set the decibel meter along the floor and marked out a walkway next to it with markers for step length, with the closest step point being a foot from the decibel meter. I figured I'd run each test five times, trying to walk as consistently as possible. Do this for all the materials, take an average, and compare the results. So here's what I found. First, Air Force One's not good sneakers. They made the most noise except for the pink foam, which is honestly just laughable. This is horrible. Then we got leather, soundboard, memory foam, the Sneak Shoe product, Rockwolf feet, skin, then socks. And I also learned that my feet click apparently. Doesn't hurt at all. Not sure if it's healthy, but it's super annoying, especially for this test when I was trying to get clean results. I did my best not to click them. Warming them up helped, so yeah, just in case you wanted to know that. But during these tests, I noticed there's even more noise sources than I thought. You have the initial impact, but you also have a sound from the rubbing of the material. So some materials are better at dampening impact, like the memory foam and rockwool, because they're pretty spongy, they have a lot of give. And other materials are better at preventing that rubbing sound, like the socks and bare feet. So I thought, what if we combine this memory foam with the less sneaky material like the soundboard? Sure enough, it worked the best. We still have some slight squeaks from the shoes. They're just not good for sneaking, so I don't think we're gonna be able to use them for this project. Still give them away though, can't forget that. But I tried just the memory foam and fabric, and it worked even better. Just two decibels above the ambient noise of the room. 17 decibels lower than the Kontrol Air Force 1s. So I'd say we're off to a good start. But another idea that might help is that active noise cancellation I was talking about. It's pretty common in headphones nowadays, and it works by canceling out one noise with another noise. Let me show you. All right, so we've got two speakers right here. I'm gonna play a tone at 400 hertz through one of them. Try and keep the audio consistent, but we've also got a decibel meter in the center, so you can see how loud it is. About 77 decibels. Now I'm gonna play the same sound through both of them. I'm gonna connect up the second speaker, and play the sound. Around 83 decibels now. Gets louder, right? Well, now I'm gonna flip the polarity on one of the speakers. So the speaker on the right will be playing the inverse tone. So they're playing the sound out of phase right now. Ready, I'm gonna disconnect one of the speakers. Gets louder even though it's playing less sound. Ready, and check this out. They're out of phase right now, but if I cover one speaker, or bring it away, even though I'm getting rid of one speaker, the sound increases. We bring it back, sound decreases, sound increases. So that's the basic principle of how it works. Cancels out sound with sound. You can even do it with this one too. Sound decreases, increases, decreases, increases. When they're put together, they cancel each other out. All right, so here's a better way to visualize it. If we drop something in water, we'd be using this Iron Man Lego piece that's got my face on it. Yup, huge flex right here. But if we drop it in water, it's gonna create ripples, just like a sound wave. Look at that, it came back up. But when we drop two objects in water at the same time, points where the ripples cross path, they interfere with each other So a peak and a peak interfere constructively and a trough and a peak interfere destructively, canceling each other out, which is how noise cancellation works. Wow, I'm like a physics teacher. Anyways, I thought about trying to use something like this in the shoes with a microphone to pick up the noise of our steps and then like a 360 speaker to put out opposite cancellation noise. Now, in theory, I still think this could work, but at the moment, I don't have good enough tools to make this actually happen because the area of the noise source and the area of the inverse sound are very important. Ideally, they should be as close together as possible so they can interfere destructively. Like I'm talking hundredths of a millimeter to make it most effective. Otherwise, you'll just double the noise as we saw in the demo. So I do think it's possible because we do know the location of the sound where your foot contacts the ground. I just don't have the resources to make that happen at the moment, but cool idea. So the last way to prevent sound is just not make it at all. Basically, that means limiting the contact with the ground. Like that's why tiptoeing is so effective. Less surface area, less noise. So I'm gonna try and make like the sole of these shoes as small as possible. That's why I don't think those large sneak shoes worked as well as they could have just because of the giant surface area. So we're definitely making progress now, but I still want something to make them just a little bit quieter. You know, really make them special because right now they're just glorified slippers even though they've already beaten both the sneak shoes and actual slippers I tested. So after a bit more digging, I came across the wildly popular AeroGel video. Shout out to Veritasium. Basically, to summarize, this material is 99% air and it's created by evaporating off the liquid inside a gel so you're just left with the structure of the gel. This results in an extremely low density material with extremely low thermal and sound conductivity as well. Like the matrix structure of this AeroGel is on the order of like five nanometers, which gives it these amazing sound and energy trapping properties. The only issue is this stuff is extremely fragile and it shatters like glass if you touch it in just the wrong way. It's not very practical if we're trying to make a shoe. Thankfully, slight alterations can be made to turn this material into what's known as an air alloy. This material is still as light as 0.1 grams per cubic centimeter, but now it's also super strong. Like some of these materials can hold up to 20,000 times their own weight. According to Interesting Engineering, this material is 100 to 1,000 times better than any other product on the market for sound insulation. That's what I'm talking about. But this material is super rigid, so it's great for walls and stuff, but again, not great for flexible shoes. Also, it's super expensive too. Like four of these little cubes of it cost half a grand. You can't even use them for the shoes because they're not flexible. Yeah, definitely hit that like button. But luckily, some researchers in Singapore have made flexible AeroGel insulation possible. That's supposedly 30% to 40% better than anything else out there on the market. So I ordered some of that, but while we wait for that to get here, let's figure out how we're actually gonna get the shoes to pop up on our feet. So at first, I thought about using motors to do this, like pull the material over our foot. Even Nitenol could work. But every way I tried to imagine that, it just got really complicated. Like once you add motors and electronics into a shoe, that's just a recipe for disaster. Something's gonna, you're gonna walk through a puddle and it's gonna break. So after watching back the video probably too many times, I realized elastics might actually be the answer. Rubber bands and stuff, they love to go from big to small. And the sole of a shoe is definitely bigger than like an ankle. So I 3D printed a shoe type mold and fit a rubber band around the outside. Now when I slide the rubber band off the lip, it instantly snaps up around my ankle. So then I tried to attach some fabric to the band, but the issue is fabric's not nearly as stretchy as a rubber band. So I had to make some cuts on the side. Like this kind of worked, but it was super sloppy and now we have holes in our shoes. So I realized for this to completely work the way I want it to, the whole thing's gonna have to be made of rubber. So I went online again and got pretty much every rubber thing I could think of that might work for this. I'm talking bands, balloons, gloves. I even found some of these rubber shoe covers. And luckily enough, one of these shoe covers actually worked perfectly. It was the right amount of flexibility and it already looks kind of stealthy. So I made a prototype out of acoustic board this time because it's got some rigidity to it, so it'd keep the elastic around the outside and it's also sound dampening too. Then I just 3D printed some end pieces to act as the lips to keep the elastic stressed around the outside. They also have a lever in them that when you push it, pushes the elastic up over the top of the ridge and snaps it up onto your foot. And this ended up working great. The rubber is stretchy enough to unroll itself onto my foot and the lips keep the shoes primed until we step on it. I figured, you know, we'd put some foam on the bottom along with some of that air alloy insulation and we should be good. But you know, what's a Black Panther video without claws? So let's make those. So I actually made some of these a while back, but I'm gonna do an updated version that's up to my new standards. Basically, we're gonna use exacto blades for the claws attached to springs. The spring will decompress into a tube that we mount on our fingers when the claws are retracted. To activate the claws, we'll attach a string to the back with a small knot that catches on a little notch in the back of the tube until we pull it, the knot releases and the claw springs out. Perfect, I'll take five. All right, so finally the air alloy insulation is here. It's super spongy, but again, we've got that aerogel nanocrystals inside, which you can actually see here, some of them are falling out. Just small pieces of aerogel really. But I think the solution is fitting given all the nanotech that Marvel uses. So I put everything together, gave it a little paint job, and now we have some sound absorbent, step-activated Black Panther shoes. The shoes now have two layers of soundboard, a layer of aerogel, a layer of foam, then more aerogel, and then I ended up covering them with some fluffy fabric because it makes almost no rubbing noise. I also drew a little Wakanda-inspired design on them. And of course, they snap on your foot when you step onto them. Yeah, I think they came out okay. But before we test them out, I wanna show off some of the inventions that you guys built and sent to me on my Instagram. Awesome stuff, guys. As always, I love seeing your creations. There's a lot of talent in this audience, let me tell ya. Speaking of which, if you guys caught my last video, we got a ton of amazing applicants to be a part of our team and help us make these videos. Like, I've had a lot of fun meeting some of you guys and getting some projects in the works. So if you're a talented engineer and wanna help actually make some of these videos, check out jailorsvideo.com slash join the team. Location, work schedule, that doesn't matter. We just want talent and the ability to create awesome stuff. All right, now let's test these out. So if we do the same walking test, we can see they're essentially silent. They stay within the ambient room fluctuation range and there's basically no correlation to the sound the shoes are making and the decibel meter. Like you can see, when I take a step, the shoes compress thanks to the foam slowing down the initial impact of my foot. Then the soundboard and the aerogel insulation also help dampen the impact along with any squeaks from the shoe. I mean, if I really boost the audio, you can slightly hear footsteps, but it's mixed in with like the rustling of the trees and the wind and other ambient noises outside. Like if I black out the screen and play the same noise, like you can't tell there's footsteps. I was literally walking circles around the decibel meter and it wasn't picking up anything. I also did a running test too and compared to the control, it did great. And cause the shoes, they actually provide protection to your feet. So better than trying to sneak around barefoot. Now, obviously like these things aren't magic. Like if you walk on a creaky floor, it's still gonna make noise. And the quieter you try to walk, the better they're gonna do. But the foam gives you a little bit of leeway. So you can take a kind of a hard step and it'll still sound pretty quiet. Combine that with the claws. Ooh, Marvel put me in a movie. So I hope you enjoyed this video guys. If you did, definitely like, subscribe. And I also wanna give a big shout out to Brilliant for sponsoring this video. If you like this kind of stuff, you'll love Brilliant. They're a problem solving based website with over 60 interactive courses in math, science, and computer programming. Like in this video, we went over the physics of sound and waves. And they've got courses on all of that, as well as classes on other everyday physics, all the way up to complex AI and neural networks and everything in between. So I'm sure you'll find something that you're interested in. A couple of things that I like is that all of Brilliant's courses have storytelling, code writing, interactive challenges, and problems to solve. So honestly, kind of similar to these videos. Like they give you tools to solve problems completely new to you, which is definitely necessary to expand your skillset. Like if you've got a project in mind and you don't know how to begin, Brilliant can help you. Like I really do support what they're all about. I try to make engineering as exciting as I can through storytelling and inspiring you guys to create, which is exactly what Brilliant does. So if you want to check them out, head over to brilliant.org slash Jlaser to sign up for free. And the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. That's all we've got for this one, guys. Take it easy. We'll catch you in the next one. Peace.