in: barb; barb > 2006-10-16;
| # Posted 2006-10-18 07:24:12 | |
| ebone: | I think it's a great idea, if you can pull it off (which sounds hard). I've thought of doing this in one of my O classes using radios.
For maximum cool factor, you need the "command center" to be a big, dark or dimly lit hall with a bunch of earphone-wearing navigators sitting at computer terminals and a giant screen with a big green radar sweep displayed on it. In the Seattle area, Mike Schuh is planning a similar event for March 3: CELL Phone O' (scroll down). It won't have the GPS tracking (or the cool mission control center), however. I don't know how easy or affordable it is to use GPS tracking. I've never seen any tracking in real time. For some reason, it is always delayed and segmentized at WOC. I think it would be more interesting in real-time, but maybe it's too hard to get a clean signal, or something like that. |
| # Posted 2006-10-18 07:28:03 | |
| Cristina: | I know I've read about some Nokia-sponsored cell phone O in Finland. Not sure where I saw it, but likely something like O Today. I think it's been run a few times. Certainly sounds entertaining.
As for the tracking, I could swear that some of the Trac-Trac'ing during WOC was live on the jumbo-tron. They never had it up there for very long, though. I think the people watching along at home on their computers could get the live dots moving, but I didn't try that... |
| # Posted 2006-10-18 07:31:46 | |
| ebone: | Oh, yeah. Trac-Trac was live sometimes. I remember watching the jagged, simplified line lurching forward, apparently past the Sprint Final controls. The runners weren't really skipping the controls, but the track was oversimplified, so it wasn't very informative about the nuances of the runners route. You could, however, tell if a runner was overtaking an earlier starter. |
| # Posted 2006-10-18 07:40:10 | |
| Cristina: | Yeah, not quite the same as watching those Catching Features dots after a race... |
| # Posted 2006-10-19 06:09:03 | |
| barb: | Thanks. I surfed a bit today and found other related applications of GPS tracking - none of them cheap and not all of them convincingly accurate. There are systems for finding your dog when he runs off. And covert and overt tracking systems for vehicles. And perhaps the coolest was this avant garde art project where they embedded a GPS transmitter in a big painting, then left the painting in a public park. The idea was that if someone stole it, they could then track where it was. It ended up at a lumber yard. They didn't seem to actually find it but they put up "lost painting" posters around the area and interviewed several people at the lumberyard.
But I digress. |
| # Posted 2006-10-19 06:14:05 | |
| barb: | So how is Mike Schuh's cell phone O going to work? If TracTrac or other technologies just aren't workable then maybe a cell phone-only-approach would be possible. We could do what I did with the jr high kids and have reference flags at a lot of the intersections, for relocating. The TracTrac type technology would make the whole thing a lot more watchable. But maybe if we had kids doing the cell-phone-O and other kids running the same course in Catching Features simultaneously... Catching Features definitely captures the attention of kids who've never orienteered.
We could also have an urban version, where we send people out in the streets right around the venue... |
| # Posted 2006-10-19 06:21:26 | |
| barb: | Cristina, I'd like to find out more about the Nokia phone-O |
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