Discussion: Head cam video

At last Sunday's sprint at Spring Lake near Santa Rosa, CA, James Scarborough strapped on a head camera and recorded part of his run. Incidentally, Spring Lake is the proposed sprint venue for the bid BAOC is submitting for the Team Trials in 2009.


James Scarborough wrote:

Some people saw me with a digital camera strapped to my forehead at Spring Lake. It was a fun sprint to record. We got the first 7 controls. Check out the video/VeoGeo links on the blog entry. You can follow along if you also open up the scan of the O map.

http://o-gear.blogspot.com/2007/09/head-cam-video-...

Maybe this could be an aid for training? RouteGadget is an excellent information source on how different people choose roots and execute (successfully or not). Additionally, from this video you can hear my thought process (as huffed out into words) and how certain mistakes and hesitations came to be.

Less beneficial, I was catching up to Rex after number 10 and he was excited at the possibility of "essentially a view of his butt"
commandeering the second half of the video. For better or worse, the camera ran out of memory at number 7.

--James

There was a flurry of interest in head-cam as a training tool about a decade ago wasn't there? Apart from being quite expensive, I thought it fell away because using the footage (er, metrage) took rather a long time - longer than doing the training. Too tough for a coach interested in several orienteers.

Viewing also tended to encourage nausea.

I am indeed planning to use this as a training tool, as I can generate a headcam video with the orienteering map in split-screen quite easily with little work involved. I think using one in a group of young runners as an example, and going through it together should give a good training effect for all of the group. Also, putting up the map alongside the video makes the nausea effect much less, as one has something to fix the eyes on. We'll see this winter;-)

An example of a GPS & headcam video from the WOC 2007 sprint in Ukraine this year can be seen 40 seconds into this video,

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1044893qHmgt9DH?c=woot...

Method: I generate an AVI video of the map with the track from my Forerunner 305 using an add-on I have made for Routegadget, and then just put the map alongside the headcam video. Works very nicely. I am planning to put up speed for the last minute in minutes/kilometer and heart rate at the bottom of the screen in addition - should not be a big problem to do that. I have been experimenting a bit with the speed part lately - you can see an example of putting up the speed in minutes/kilometers at the map here,

http://news.worldofo.com/2007/09/24/routechoice-wi...