Work of TTGearLab :
(1) The concept of blade
(2) Designing the constructions of plywoods (using performance indices)
(3) Overall graphic design (under the new design rule of adidas)
Hypertouch is a single model that was developed as the standard adidas fiber blade for top adidas players. Although there were good outer-fiber blades such as FiberTec Power and e FiberTec Classic in adidas blade range, those blades couldn’t replace the Butterfly outer ALC blades with Koto top layer those were used by many top players, because the characteristics of those two were somewhat different from that of Viscaria or Timo Boll ALC. Therefore adidas needed the thin outer fiber blade whose top layer is Koto.
The development started as the fiber version of Feng Tianwei Special Edition. That was because it is expected that Feng Tianwei would replace her blade with Butterfly outer ALC blade. But, due to the policy of adidas, the naming was changed to the one without the player’s name. And, the newly selected name was ‘Hypertouch’. The first considered name was ‘Hyperdrive’. But, the naming was changed to ‘Hypertouch’ because ‘Hyperdrive’ could cause copyright issues.
The graphic design is based on that for RadiX series. But, adidas design rule from 2013 was newly applied. That is the big adidas logo on the top left of blade head. The ‘adidas red’ was also applied as the color of logo. The coloring of handle is the combination of green and burgundy red. The green was adopted to match the image color of 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games.
Regarding construction, at a glance the plywood construction looks similar to that of Butterfly Viscaria except for the color of fiber (red vs. blue). However, the middle layer of Hypertouch is different from that of Butterfly Viscaria or Timo Boll ALC. Regardless of that big difference, Hypertouch provided the optimum feeling and performance those were liked by top players at that time.
Unfortunatly Hypertouch couldn’t be used by Feng Tianwei or Gao Ning. However, Jonathan Groth of Danish Men’s National Team selected Hypertouch as his blade and used at WTTC.
Following are the performance indices of Hypertouch :
– Ep = 2.43
– Ec = 2.01 (Ec/Ep = 0.83)
– Vp = 1.31
– Vl = 1.34 (Vl/Vp = 1.03)
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