Turning a climbing wall into a video game | Hacker News Reader

Turning a climbing wall into a video game

joinrandori.com

98 pointsspacewaffle27 comments

I don't remember exactly the name of it but my local gym (Stone Gardens Bellevue) has an Android enabled climbing marker game in the kids area. You can pick from an elimination game or vary the routes and it times you. It uses some light sensor to determine if you touch the hold. The interface is a small android tablet on the wall. Its definitely an in-market product but a quick search didn't turn it up for me. Anyone know what its called?

I've always thought it would be fun to somehow incorporate technology into climbing for tracking or otherwise augmenting the experience.

Time trials sound like a quick avenue to painful injury, though. If I were a gym, I'd be cautious in encouraging it. In my experience, climbing prowess is not a matter of speed but control -- the more statically you can complete a route the more control you demonstrate. A friend of mine once said his goal is to complete a route as silently as possible, avoiding accidental scuffs of his shoes or knocking of his knuckles on the wall. This is actually a great measure of control, too.

> Time trials sound like a quick avenue to painful injury

Oh it's already a thing, injury or no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4n6xfu8VDU

That's pretty different than this though. Those people have made those exact moves hundreds or thousands of times. They know how to set their shoulders for those moves and aren't put in situations with novel foot work that could mess up their knees. Those routes are also rather easier than the hardest thing they could climb. All of the holds are massive, not necessarily good, but large enough that finger injury should be very unlikely.

The parent is worried about the combination of pushing the limit of what you can do safely with your strength and doing so as fast as possible. This can lead to being out of control, and strength and technique are part of what keep you safe.

You should probably have a very high level of climbing fitness before you even consider this, though I can see it being potentially quite useful. You would also have to break down what is going on in the route that is generated and how it might be dangerous. Throwing out drop knees[0] and heel hooks[1] and yanking on crimps[2] is a great way to get wrecked if you don't know _exactly_ what you're doing.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHlzC7EqyDA

[1] - https://climbingtogetherandotherfunadventures.files.wordpres...

[2] - really tiny holds => https://www.google.com/search?q=climbing+crimp&tbm=isch

Explosive power is pretty important though, and this would be a nice way to train it outside of campus boarding which gives you one movement on each side of your body. This gives an avenue for a lot of different movement, but then there are system boards for that as well and those are a little more "quantifiable". Maybe this would be a good way to mix it up of you're bored of system boarding?

I agree about being cautious about using this. It seems like a good way for new people to mess up their shoulders. The thought of hitting crimps that hard/fast is terrifying.

I do really want to take some of my friends who climb like Fred Nicole (super slow and static as possible) and make them use this though. Sometimes utilizing momentum is important. Sometimes climbing everything static is a huge waste of energy and is actually bad technique, despite being generally safer and better for training outright strength (as opposed to power).

Timing could be automated with a webcam and CV to just watch for any motion near the markers. With a recording of each run, you could push ghosted runs through the projector like racing games.

Absolutely. Automating this would be a great idea, was actually what I thought was happening on first watch.

It's clever as since the image is small, isolated graphics and the interaction is quite close to the surface it helps with reducing the typical problem of shadows obscuring a projection.

I assumed this does that, but after watching the video again it seems like he is basically projecting an image.

Maybe it would be more accurate with sensors in the holds (maybe a low range IR sensor on each one). Starting/stopping the timer then would just be a matter of touching the right hold.

Very cool.

I bet you can make a business out of it - not only for game purposes, but also training.

Kinda like a live action Mega Girp: http://doougle.net/projects/mega-girp.html

Pretty neat. It'd be cool to see some enhancements to the interface. For example, having some feedback on hitting the white dots would be nice. Maybe they turn red, or the surrounding area flashes a color. Also, a countdown starting timer could be projected near the players head so they know when to start. Also some indicator arrows that are always shining near the player so they know where the other dots are, which may be hard to see depending on the wall's shape.

This is really cool! Any chance of seeing it open sourced?

There was a clone that someone in r/climbing made and put up on github. Not sure how good it is though but I'd assume he's open to pull requests.

https://github.com/gumbykid/Climbing-Games/tree/master

The code is okay.

The main mode has all the features - timer, high score, ordered score board, different layouts.

The other modes are more in testing and need some additional features, but are functional.

No motion sensing. It's far too complicated for such a simple game and a full time student with a job. A solution would be to make it on a tablet and whenever a climber hits a "hold", the person using the tablet could hit it as well, essentially doing manual motion detection. Could also click on a computer.

I encourage pull requests.

An easy way to check would be to give the users gloves of a distinguishable color they are not wearing (it just have to cover the back of the hand) and check for that color to cover the dots.

That's one way (tape on the back of hand so it doesn't impact climbing). Another way is to make it a distinguishable shape and color (white triangle) that a Kinect could be coded to recognize. The problem lies in that for motion detection to be fun, it should be interactive, as in create new shapes on the fly and such. Instantly recognizing them would be tougher to implement, since I have little experience in motion detection.

Oops, make the shapes distinguishable, not the glove/tape

Sounds like it isn't going to be open sourced. Someone else made a clone and put it on github, see here https://www.reddit.com/r/climbing/comments/3p2soa/bouldering...

As others have posted, this is my code (someone linked me here from reddit) https://github.com/gumbykid/Climbing-Games/tree/master

I want others to contribute and I'm open to changing the designs of things, that part is fairly easy

Really cool project, people might actually pay for a setup like that to show up around town given that response.

That's cool and all... but I can't help but think, "I spend my entire day staring at screens -- rock climbing is an escape from that kind of thing."

God I miss a climbing gym around my city...

Very nice project, I would love to try it.

Would be even more fun to have some google glasses with the routes on it.

Cool project, I could see this type of idea expanded into showing real time replays on fields/training programs.

Um, safety? Seriously though, I don't want to be "that guy" but the very first thing I thought was "shouldn't you be paying attention to the wall and your body?" To me this seems like driving and txting at the same time.

another example of augmented reality : http://www.battlekart.eu/fr/accueil

Reply on news.ycombinator.com