Show HN: My local climbing gym from photogrammetry | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My local climbing gym from photogrammetry

kmcheung12.github.io

29 pointsa_c11 comments

Commented on yesterday's Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026), thought I might as well submit a Show HN.

If you see climbing world cup/championship, there is this 3D modelling thing [1]. I want that for my weekly bouldering.

I scanned my local climbing gym into 3D mesh using iphone. Built a simple editor to trim, merge, move/rotate meshes. You can interact with the mesh, view routes, view climb, etc. So this is unlike many gaussian splatting projects where the main use is for viewing. I built a pipeline in updating climbing walls. Climbing routes are manually annotated. Climbing videos are registered against the 3D mesh. Based on one input video, body positions resolved into 3D/4D space. you can view the body landmarks from different angle.

COLMAP, OpenMVS, fastapi, svelte, database is just local json files. A read only build is exported so I can host on github page

If you climb, or know someone who climbs, would love to hear your feedback. Do you usually record your climbs? If I make this a service, what will make you use it?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8zdUOaCr6DY

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I’m a very active climber, and record a lot of my climbs. I think at a glance there are two things that would make me hesitant to start using this. Firstly, my gym rotates sets weekly and re-recording each wall each week seems repetitive. Secondly and more importantly, I’m not sure how valuable information this would be. Maybe for outdoor problems, or system boards? It’s inarguably really cool, but I’m not sure how I’d actually incorporate into my sessions.

On route rotation, maybe the gym will be responsible for uploading the scan. My local gym uses an app to manage route. People view what route is available on a wall. It is just a label saying "red is a V4", no photos, and every month there is a leaderboard. People apparently use it. And occasionally people share their beta there.

For outdoor problems, I imagine it will be more like a map, and recording be taken with a drone. This is in contrast to the climbing magazine with plain photos of route.

I also think the usefulness decline as climbing ability increase. At the end of the day, climber just want to climb. But maybe there is some strava angle I can explore.

Appreciate your feedback, thank you!

Cool demo but unfortunately I don’t see much use. Kaya and instagram are already very popular and better for sharing beta (at least in the US). Maybe if it were higher fidelity and you could see millimeter level detail of holds, but at the level where it would matter it’s probably only marginally useful.

This is an interesting idea. I was wondering if the app contain following features could make it better, loved to discuss them:

1. There will be a weekly weekly leaderboard on the app for different walls and routes. Climbers need upload and share videos of their attemptes to qualify for the leaderboard. Since the app could resolve the input video into 3D/4Dspace, it could automatically determine and calculate the time that each climber takes to finish the route. The leaderboard resets every week, based on the gym's route-setting schedule.

2. For beginners, it can be difficult for them to identify the correct sequence of moves. If you could partnered with the gyms to place a QR code on each wall, climbers could scan it to view the recommended beta or move sequence on the app when they are stuck. That would be really helpful.

Solid feedback, thanks!

1. is very doable. My local gym uses an app to manage monthly leaderboard already and people seem to like it. There is a friendly rivalry in my local gym where people "fight" for the top spots

2. A lot can be done from the helping beginner angle. A coach told me he wishes to show hip placement and movement to young climbers, as it is easier to show than to tell an 8yo. I thought of doing inverse kinematics from holds to resolve body positions, so I get beta (sequence of moves) for each problem right away. Too hard, don't know if it is solvable.

A bit tangential, I think in theory the climbing wall with a set of problems is itself an identifiable code. We might get rid of the QR code too. I can create an index of visual features that resolves to a camera position, raycast from camera position to narrow down to maybe 3-5 problems, and select videos from there. But I digress.

https://griptonite.io/ my gym uses this, qr/nfc on routes with ability to take video and it shows you as stick man and where weight is etc. its new but seems good!

Same!

Wow this is a great idea and I wish my local climbing gym had something like that. Maybe it is a good idea to put a help section for every route and visualize this.

On some videos we can see other climbers' face that are not blurred in the background.

I wrote the faceblurring. It didn’t work on multiple faces when I first processed the videos. Thanks for pointing out, I should have blurred them

This is awesome. Being able to "walk" around the climber is such a cool idea!

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