Anyone ever thought of a headsup display to replace a slalom course?

[skinut]

I was taking the USA Waterski Survey and thinking about the future of the sport. I know there has been a lot of discussion on this site about how to revitalize our industry. One of the things we can all agree with is that part of the problem is lack of access to slalom courses.

 

What about this, a virtual slalom course that can be used anywhere at any time. Think about the headsup displays that are projected onto car windshields could the same idea be applied to the boat driver? They have a virtual picture of the course on their windshield as they are pulling the skier. So what about the skier? They have a google glass type device that is worn that projects the same virtual slalom course the driver sees except the perspective is from their point of view while skiing the course. To some extent this is being used in snow skiing and other areas. Why couldn't it be used in our sport as well. Think about how this would open up the world of course skiing. The course could be adjusted based on the skills of the skier at any time, no worries about injury from hitting a buoy, no course maintenance, and you could do it any where you found good water.

 

Check out the reconjet. The technology is here, would it be that tough to apply to waterskiing?

 

[lcgordon]

it would be a neat idea

[oldjeep]

Pretty different usecase isn't it? The recon ski goggles I've seen are just projecting data points like a HUD display in a car, not trying to keep track of which way your head is facing and trying to show you an imaginary ball.

[andjules]

We've had a few discussions about this in the past.

The technology is being developed—virtual overlays on real terrain, updating with the movements of the wearer—but last I saw, it wasn't there yet. As per @oldjeep's comments, it requires a lot more computing power than the reconjet example above (like google glass and other similar displays), which just overlays numeric data - a virtual course display would have to perfectly match the real environment with a virtual one, in 3d (both spatially and in the sense of feeding different images to each eye), while in motion in several dimensions/axes.

But yes, someday, this may vastly simplify our sport.

[skinut]

I think that the technology, when it's ready, could really open up a lot of opportunities to expand skiing and more than likely impact almost any sport out there. I would think the virtual displays in fighter jet helmets would have software capable of rendering a virtual environment over the real one with regard to positional data. The tech is here, but is it affordable?

[lcgordon]

No it is not affordable. Considering the people that you are trying to reach out to are the less serious and for lack of a better word poorer people. If people could have the money to buy that helmet and software then they could probably just join a private lake.

[MattP]

I want other people to see me round the Orange balls in the water !

[RazorRoss3]

I think the other barrier to access is cost, let's not add to what is already a capital intensive sport. Just out of college it's out of reach to think about a ski upgrade much less google glass. Fortunately I like my ski so much I won't need an upgrade for a few years.

[dchristman]

I choose the red pill - I'm staying out of The Matrix!

[E_T]

And here I thought the main demographic here was into the little blue pill

[bbirlew]

@lcgordon,

Just joining a private site isn't an option for everyone... Closest one to me is a 5 hr trip including an 80$ ferry ride.

However, I have miles of glass calm water to shred.

I'd buy one in a second and put it in 'continuous' mode and see how many turns I could rip in a row!!

[lcgordon]

@bbirlew Idk about the prices but im guessing the technology if it was available right now would cost about as much as your boat.

[DW]

A buddy of mine build a box he attaches to the pylon that acts a bit like the Trakker device except when the rope hits the proper angle for a given rope length it triggers a light to signal the skier they are wide enough. Does not handle the longitudinal distance, but it is a training tool to get the skier to understand how wide they need to be to course ski. A conversation was where to put the light, general consensus on the transom was about the best place.

[Splasheye]

Audio slalom has been used for years for visually impaired athletes in competition and training.

http://audio-slalom.be/

 

 

[dchristman]

@Splasheye the website isn't very informative... It's not clear, even watching the video, how the system is supposed to aid a visually impaired skier. Can you describe how it works?

[Ed_Obermeier]

IMO this is in the same vein as the self installing, auto positioning GPS slalom course. The technology involved is yet to be proven and the cost, were it to become available, is likely highly prohibitive to the average water skier. Fun to think about, cool idea, totally unrealistic. Just keeping it real folks...

[ForrestGump]

Considering flight helmets for the F35 which project virtual reality onto the back of the lenses cost $500,000, me thinks we're not getting virtual reality glasses for anything reasonable.

[h2onhk]

we were discussing something very similar this year.....like a holographic projector mounted to the front of a boat. flip a switch wherever its smooth and instantly run set! granted the theory is very star trekish. Ironically I'm sure in 1900 if you walked up to someone and told them in the future you could take a little device the size of a deck of cards and talk to someone instantaneously half way around the world they would have told you you were insane. :smile: only time will tell.

[Jordan]

or....get some jugs, rope and cement blocks and go old school !!

[Drago]

Would be cool on open water just to train.

[thager]

HUD for centerline might be cool!

[dchristman]

@usaski1 Have you seen the audio slalom system that @Splasheye mentioned and do you know how it works?

[Splasheye]

@dchristman just to be clear the product I linked to has nothing to do with SplashEye! I've just seen it in use in competitions and know several people who use it a lot. And on any stretch of water it will tell you if you got to slalom course width 6 times in the length of a slalom course.

[dchristman]

@splasheye It tells who? The video looks like the feedback is to the boat crew rather than the skier - is there some audio feedback to the skier via wireless?

[MattP]

@dchristman the feedback is downloadable to a computer (with the systems I have seen). The skier can hear the tone from the boat.

[Splasheye]

@dchristman audio feedback to the skier. It used to be called the bat-blaster because of the high pitched sound it used

[dchristman]

@splasheye it sounds like it's more of a scoring system than a guidance system. I'm still curious as to how it works from the skier's perspective.

[Waternut]

I think we'd have better luck projecting lights from the boat than risking an expensive HUD on the skier. The skier may need to wear special glasses to aid in viewing the lights on the water but those are usually only $10-$15 (think laser rangefinder glasses). Maybe even something as simple as dropping 4 buoys in the water that shoot a laser down the simulated course and a device on the boat intersects it at the appropriate time....but then you're temporarily putting stuff in the water again and become locked into a certain location just like a floating course.

 

Even if the goggles came down to $1k-$2k, you'd need one for the driver and one for the skier to keep you both on the same "course" and one harsh OTF might send those fancy goggles to the bottom of the lake or damage them if you could figure out how to make them float and not be enormous.

[usaski1]

The audio slalom stuff is amazing, and I hear there is going to be major revisions to it soon. Basically, It will chirp if you have made a successful turn (bouy). You have to ski out to where you think it should be, and then turn, and then it will chirp. So there's a lot to say abut pre-turn, just like for us sighted skiers. It measures 6 turns in a pass, but doesn't track where these turns are, that's my understanding of it. I am far and away NOT the authority on this.

[ajgear]

How about a GPS enabled rope handle. If linked to the GPS in the boat via bluetooth or other wireless (or wired for that matter, since you do have a rope going to the boat), it could easily tell where the imaginary buoys are and could give some haptic feedback to the skier via vibrations in the handle. For example, a slow pulse until the skier reaches the buoy line, then a series of quicker pulses leading to the buoy, and then a constant buzz that signals the skier to turn. If you really want to get accurate, given that the handle may actually be inside the buoy line, one could put the GPS unit on the ski boot and send the haptic signal through a vibration in a leg band or other device connected to the skier (or still send it through the rope handle). The cost of unit like that could be as low as a couple hundred dollars with a unit for the boat and the handle/ski unit.

[ajgear]

If you really wanted to make it fancy, you could attach it to a plotter visible on a phone or tablet so the skier could see their line after the run.

[skinut]

So I guess that its too expensive, won't work, googles might fly off, etc. My point was to think about the future and not dismantle something that hasn't been invented yet. I guess this is why our sport will die a cold lonely death. No one wants to think outside the box and re-envision the possibilities. I'm cool with continuing to use my portable course, but my kids probably won't ever see one again after I get tired of skiing.

[ajgear]

@skinut, I think you're looking at this wrong. While others have pointed out areas where the HUD may be impractical at the moment, it has started a good conversation about what IS practical at the moment. Star Trek put a lot of ideas in peoples' heads. Eventually those big ideas became practical things. We're not hurdling through space at warp speed because of them, but we did get wireless flip phones (communicators), stun guns (set phasers to 'stun'), etc. So thinking about something that is completely impractical at the moment is not, IMHO, a waste of time. It simply opens the mind to all possibilities between now and the future where that impractical idea may become practical. And that is important.

[andjules]

Not at all @skinut - I think this will be great someday, for all the skiers struggling on public water or with other lake owners about the unsightliness of a course. Also would let us ski wherever is calmest, not where the course is.

 

But, as I said, I did some research... it was about 18-24 months ago and I found a university engineering department that was working on this kind of thing—had a youtube video I think—overlaying virtual and real landscapes in a stereoscopic display and updating as the user changed position and head orientation. Very cool, and seemed to hit all the conceptual requirements... but also pretty far off still in terms of computing power. The guy was still tethered to a very fast computer box if I recall correctly, and it was updating at a rate of about 1 frame per second, with only very primitive shapes in the overlay. But soon enough they'll have something contracted to the defense sector, it'll improve, get practical, get networked (driver/boat need to be sync'd), get small, rugged and waterproof, and then slowly trickle down to hackers... and hopefully there will be a devoted slalom hacker to make our version.

[dchristman]

I'm really intrigued with the idea of audio feedback rather than the visuals. The ability to hear the ski path as a continuously variable tone rather than just a chirp at the ball might be useful to help navigate the course, visually impaired or sighted. Save your audio passes and compare them to the audio tracks of the pros. Use the tracks from your best passes to facilitate mental practice in the off season. A potential drawback of the system might be sensory overload - anyone remember the continuous orgasm loop from the movie Brainstorm? The northern ballofspray afflicted might spend the entire off season listening to Nate or Regina loops at 41.

[Waternut]

@skinut I totally disagree with your last statement. I really didn't read most people's posts as being "it'll never work". The way I read most posts was...it's a great idea and many of us want it but the technology just isn't there yet and here's why. You can't problem solve if you don't know the problems and identifying these kinds of problems from the skiing community is what the smart people need to potentially develop something like this in the future.

[V2skier]

The current audio slalom device works like this: A person in the boat arms the system. The system then signals with a loud signal to you, the skier. You pull out to do a normal gate shot. When you cross the centerline the timer of the unit starts. When you has skied far enough out on the right side of the boat, the unit gives a signal to mark that the 1st ball is cleared. Then you ski towards the 2nd ball and so on... When the 6th ball is cleared you have to cross the centerline before the time is up. The same boat times as in the course is used. You adjust the time by setting the speed on the unit, and how far out you have to pull by the rope lenght i.e the shorter the rope, the bigger the angle and the further out you have to ski.

You definitly can use it to simulate training in the course. I'm blind, but have completed my next hardest pass in a normal course without this system. Was of course lucky to hit the gates :-)

[dchristman]

@V2skier thank you for the detailed explanation. This is a eureka moment! It seems that BAT and IPA operate the same way - based on RAT (rope length, angle, time). The difference is IPA measures to analyze and BAT gives instant feedback. In fact, IPA could easily be turned into a BAT system!

 

Wouldn't it be great to have this capability built into the speed control of every boat? A benefit for the sighted and visually impaired? Maybe Perfect Pass can beat ZO to the punch and create and add-on kit. The XYbox kit would include the angle sensor for the pylon. I envision an angle sensor in every pylon and a BATIPA in every boat!

 

To raise @skinut 's hope for the future, the next add-on would be the goggle course projection system. After than we add the brain implants... jeeze! I'm so conflicted. But to stay out of the Matrix you have to understand it. Besides, with the addition of enablement for the visually impaired it becomes a more noble path to go down.

 

[dchristman]

I heard this today on NPR - that's what I want to do with slalom data!