Nike’s Medieval Ice Helmet retains hot Heads Cool

If it have been crafted in steel, you’d swear Nike’s unnamed new helmet was straight out of Sparta. as a substitute, it’s sewn from one of the most intricate fabrics ever devised to offer a distinct kind of aggressive benefit: maintaining an athlete’s face feeling cool.

That’s proper, Nike has developed one of their relax vests into a conceptual product that you wear in your head.

The garment used to be impressed by means of a request from a U.S. Olympian and decathlon world document holder, Ashton Eaton, who complained that in scorching conditions, he truly needed a solution to cool the stifling mugginess around his head. because it seems, the face is very sensitive to warmth—Nike claims 2-5x than the remainder of your physique, which sounds in line with exterior research—and so the Nike apparel Innovation crew created this hood for him to wear.

The hood itself is sewn from SAF, a highly absorbent subject matter that uses chemical bonding to soak up 200x its weight in water. (That netting you see around the face is actually a 3-D scan of Eaton’s head, no longer a part of the helmet, sadly.) The garment isn’t intended to wick moisture like most performance tools. in reality, it’s designed to do the opposite: The hood is presoaked and chilled in an icebox, then donned for temporary comfort, like a custom tailored moist towel.

“this is meant for use between occasions of the decathlon, now not while in truth competing/working,” writes Sandy Bodecker, VP of special initiatives, Nike Innovation, over electronic mail “The perception from Ashton was once that his face/head got hot between situations, so this masks is designed to resolve for an athlete drawback.”

Nike hasn’t shared plans for future mainstream release, but provided that their cool vests have been in use since the 2008 Beijing Olympics and nonetheless aren’t available for public buy, it’s cheap to suppose that their helmet will stay unique to Nike subsidized athletes for the foreseeable future.

[via Engadget]