F1 Indian GP in real time with Google Maps | Hacker News Reader

F1 Indian GP in real time with Google Maps

labs.lusob.com

151 pointslusob42 comments

Ok, a while back, pg said he wanted to kill Hollywood - and I never got the meaning. You would still need actors, cameramen, producers even, etc etc. And netflix is hardly disruptive

Now I can glimpse it.

This is fantastic. Watching F1 is boring on the TV - mostly because you either cannot get a feel for the real speed or you lose track of the race.

With gps in the cars, ability to stream from the cockpit mounted cameras - F1 could become the first mass audience sport to use different feeds really well.

It depends which TV station you're watching. The BBC and Sky in the UK already have circuit trackers from the car's GPS, ability to choose from 10 or so different camera feeds (onboards, pits, etc.) and full feeds of all pit radio released by the FIA.

I wouldn't count on the established players leaving this to new disrupters, especially where there is adequate competition, i.e. in the UK.

I think all F1 live streams are same as they are prepared by the on-site directors.

I've never noticed. I guess I should press the red button?

You may also need the Sky dedicated F1 channel (Which you get with the sports package).

You don't actually need then sports package to watch Sky Sports F1, just the HD pack.

I think you might be able to just download the Sky Sports companion iPad app to get the other camera feeds. Or you may need a Sky Go login, I can't remember.

F1 has been doing this for a while. They've had some great camera angles on the cars for the last 20 years and in the last 5 or so (at least in the UK) we've been able to stream the race online, select different cameras and see live telemetry and car locations via GPS. This live timing map is nice but it's nothing new. The major players have been doing it for a few years.

It's a tad different in the US.

The US Speed Channel 'coverage' is three guys in a shed in North Carolina watching the feed.

Worse still, it's continually interrupted by long ads. Great example of why US style cable TV just plain sucks.

I've noticed this watching the Indycar races. In NZ they come over Sky Sport, which doesn't really have ads. If it's in the middle of a race we stay with the live feed while the US breaks for ads.

I don't know how you manage to watch sports when all the action happens during breaks and you don't get replays.

This is basically what the official F1 iPad app is like, which I happened to have with me at the Australian Grand Prix last year. It made a pretty big difference to actually know when various drivers were about to come past, and what was happening in the other parts of the track.

As things got more tense toward the end of the race other spectators were crowding around for an overview which our eyes couldn't possibly provide, considering our vantage point. It was definitely one of those "holy shit I'm living in the future" kind of moments.

Yep. I routinely watch a torrented/PVR'd race with the iPad App running the 'live' timing and scoring. It really does make a huge difference.

At some (most?) F1 races you can rent out a "Fanvision" unit which is basically a portable tablet that contains live timing and commentary. Unfortunately for us at the Japanese Grand Prix this year it was only available in Japanese... so I made do with the live timing app on my iPhone instead.

Definitely invaluable, otherwise I would have had no idea what was going on!

Is there a curated list of such live real-time data sources? A directory if you will; cutting across different sources like train/flight info, shopping, finance, sports, politics/elections etc.

Guess most of them wont be free, but some of them could be.

I'd also be interested in that sort of list

Same here.

I wonder how they made this. My guess would be that they aren't using GPS data but checkpoint times.

http://lusob.com/2012/04/f1-live-timing-map/

Exactly. Which means they are simply interpolating the time and distance between the checkpoints. So it's not 100% "true".

Very very ingenious hack though.

That would explain all of the crazy rubber banding that always seems to start and stop at exactly the same spots.

Are you sure the "rubber banding" isn't just normal race behavior? In circuit racing, the cars tend to follow each other at pretty stable intervals. In other words, the time between two race cars stays constant. As the speed of the cars ranges from 50mph to 200mph+, the distance between two cars changes a lot as the time between the cars is relatively constant.

So in slow corners, the cars pack close to each other (feet or sometimes even inches) and as they accelerate out of the corners at 2g+ the distance can increase to tens or hundreds of feet.

"Are you sure the "rubber banding" isn't just normal race behavior?"

Yes (I'm sure it isn't), zoom in on the bottom right hand corner of the track (turn 4), in reality the cars go from 320kph to 100kph in the breaking zone of this corner, on the page they're doing that almost instantly as they hit that point.

Yes, this is not normal race behavior, it is rubber-banding in places where the cars would never be accelerating and decelerating.

Now why can't they do this for UPS and FedEx trucks for consumers.

(they already do it for buses in some cities)

Because their routes are optimized based on all packages. They will have to deal with customers who start questioning why the driver didn't take xyz path which would have delivered his package faster (Though may result in slow delivery for everyone else).

Perfect transparency is great in an ideal world. But we (Humans) are not all that matured :)

I guess the company owners would argue against it based on security concerns, especially if the courier is delivery packages that have high net worth

If it's security concerns you can see UPS and FedEx trucks every day on the road, just follow one - or even just watch them leave the hub!

So that logic seems incorrect.

But you don't know what is in the trucks.

djhworld is talking about a scenario where someone at a company knows a certain high-price shipment is coming in. He could talk to accomplices and direct them to the exact truck and intercept/steal the item before it's delivered. Who would know there was a connection between the theives and the insiders?

On a more practical note, I can understand why UPS/FedEx wouldn't want consumers to see this. They would be bugging the hell out of the customer support reps asking why their truck wasn't stopping at their place first, etc. Sure, if the driver is lost, that's another story, but I think the larger companies already track their equipment in realtime. The signature pads are always live now.

They're trying to deter the lazy criminals?

I think you can currently do this by using google latitude, all these trucks will need is a device capable of checking into google latitude. A raspberry pie with WIFI should do, and for protocol to send back data they can use MQTT. Also read about the idea of internet of things, might interest you.

Neat. It's not perfect (i.e., the rubber banding effect that others have mentioned here), but there's a lot of potential in this idea.

My main sport is cycling, and the UCI (the governing body) has banned the live transmission of GPS data from bikes.

Have you heard why the transmission was banned? I've only come across some speculation by someone who had implemented telemetry at a race (http://blog.urremote.com/2012/05/uci-bans-race-tracking-unti...), and someone who had thought the UCI banned it to allow only one organization to provide it (bottom of the thread: http://weightweenies.starbike.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&#...)

I don't think the UCI has ever fully explained their reasoning.

On page 10 of this PDF [1], they explain that they are responsible for regulating technical innovation, and they talk about some of the advantages of having live GPS data. On-rider cameras are also banned, and the issue of who has rights to the footage is mentioned. Interesting, they say that other live data — speed and heart rate and power etc. — isn't banned, but this only seems to be because it hasn't been submitted to the UCI for approval, which means it's banned anyway.

The first lot of comments on this post from The Inner Ring [2] discuss the issue, and it seems most likely that the UCI doesn't want third parties transmitting anything from races, although this doesn't explain why they're not allowed to transmit data back to the team car. (Perhaps it's got something to do with the ban on race radios?)

1. http://www.uci.ch/Modules/BUILTIN/getObject.asp?MenuId=&...

2. http://inrng.com/2012/09/vuelta-power-analysis/

On a similar note, I was hoping that the end of F1 coverage by SPEED in the US will lead to more openly-available coverage. I was less hopeful when I learned that NBC would be picking it up. Any ideas from the HN community about where to find coverage online (I'm willing to pay, of course). Some of the comments here have me hopeful that a VPN in the UK and a connection to BBC will do the trick!

If you know any good way to get UK sports coverage in the US please let me know. I was in London for two weeks this summer and I loved that their coverage didn't pause for commercials every few minutes. I'd be willing to pay. Considering this is the only remaining reason why I have cable, I'd be willing to pay more than most for a high quality picture.

(Plus it would be awesome to have good cricket coverage in gone US)

unblock-us.com will get you access to iPlayer, both recorded and streaming. Not sure about other channels though, never watch them.

can't wait for fia to block this..

on the other hand, although cool, this isn't a new thing.. slapping google maps is a nice touch, i prefer just the circuit.. its much more clear.. i don't have the link right now.. its a bookmarked in another computer.. but as far as i know, it was blocked recently as he's getting the telemetry data without the fia's permission..

FIA do not own the rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_Group

We just need this combined with a game, our own car/tag, micro-machine-esque controls and we're sorted :)

Very cool idea. I've been discussing different ways race data could be visualized with a friend as we watch the race, checked HN during a commercial break and found this. Thanks.

Here's the project on Github: https://github.com/lusob/f1mapp

it looks cool, but I would have to see it side by side of an actual formula race (on tv) to see whether it's of any use. f1 is a sport where tenths of seconds determine your position on the track and I'm not sure whether you can accurately enough depict that on the map using only online timings.

No matter what I try I only get the demo race. Guess something's playing silly buggers on my network :/

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