New GPS Technology Offered at French Ski Resorts
This is an interesting story / idea.
It seems that a company called Sumit is offering a GPS services at a number of resorts. When I first came across this I thought the idea was they were offering a data-upload of on-mountain resources, i.e. location of restaurants, bars, trails lifts etc, to GPS units. But no, for £16.50 per person per day, if booked in advance online ,or €25 if booked in the resort, a ski / snow boarder can hire a GPS unit to record their skiing for the day. At the end of the day you take the unit back to the Sumit and you get a print out of the routes you have skied / boarded with your speeds and rates of descent. It appears that they are using a Garmin Geko GPS units to capture the data.
I must admit I did the above back in about 1997 and it was good fun. I used a Garmin unit in my rucksack top pocket and skied the day at Killington. As I remember it it was a good day of skiing (a little overcast) and in the evening I downloaded the track data to my computer. It made interesting viewing to see the GPS tracks of the routes I had skied and my speeds. One problem was I did have a number of ’signal drop-outs’ where the GPS unit couldn’t get a signal. This may have been due to the position of the GPS in my rucksack, but was more likely due to the narrow wooded trails at Killington… I will have to see if I can find that old file!
Sumit is offering their services at Portes Du Soleil – Morzine, and Les Gets; Espace Killy – Tignes, Val D’isere; Paradiski – Les Arcs (Events Only), La Plagne (Events Only); and the Three Valleys – Courchevel, La Tania (Events Only), and Meribel.
And this all fits in with something interesting that is going on at MMISoftware… more on that later!
Update – The ‘hinted’ at ‘going on at MMISoftware‘ was actually referring to two programs that were in development.
During the work for thesnowsite.com there has been a need for programs that can tag photos with data describing where the picture was taken. As a result MMISoftware developed two programs – PhotoInfoEditor can add descriptions and summary text to the ‘meta-data’ (this is data stored in the photo file) of the photo, and geographical location by placing a pointer on a map, and PhotoGPSEditor can also add descriptions and summary text to the ‘meta-data’ of the photo, and can match photos to a GPS track to provide geographical location information. Both programs are freeware and require Mac OS X 10.4 or greater (PhotoInfoEditor Download – PhotoGPSEditor Download)- 28 Jan 2007 10:43:16
