Wednesday, December 14, 2005

River Rat

Check out RiverRat. It's an attempt by a group of MIT students to build a "lightweight, robust, real-time, tracking system for up to 30 boats". The idea is to make college sailboat racing more interesting for spectators and also to allow for post-race analysis.

The system seems like a small-scale version of Virtual Spectator as now being applied to the Volvo Ocean Race. But it's not clear from this website what actually happened to the project. The team built some prototypes and did some testing but after that the record, at least on their website, peters out.

Now if we had this system for Laser frostbiting I could really see all the different ways I screwed up on Sunday!


1 comment:

Litoralis said...

Looks like it came out of the iCampus program. I know some of the guys who worked on the project and I suspect that some of them graduated and the project just went away. It does look like a good idea though. I suspect that tracking boats on the small scale required to make a reasonable view of a dinghy race is quite a challenge.

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