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Monday 6 July 2009

The next step in orienteering

Hat tip to O-Kansas for this interesting article. The technology isn't ripe perhaps, but the video below illustrates an application which may show some future developments for orienteering.

Seek ’n Spell gameplay video from Retronyms on Vimeo.

O-Kansas suggests random generation of trainings (harder than it sounds), but what interests me more is the potential in the future for "control less" control sites. Navigate into the site and your gps device vibrates. You move on while the person 50 metres to your left has nothing to alert them to your visiting the control, a whole new dimension of cunning and gamesmanship.

Labour saving in control placement, recovery. Cost savings in control infrastructure. I seriously think it will happen. We will praise people like Michael Wood when this happens who are actively seeking to align New Zealand orienteering maps with the GPS system.

Any thoughts out there?

4 comments:

Alistair said...

Those newly revised IOF rules regarding GPS's would have to be rewritten again :-P

Unknown said...

haha, yeah I suspect the IOF isn't ahead of the game on this one.

Unknown said...

Pluses: Less fieldwork for setters. Eliminate following in races. Brent gets to keep his flash watch. Spectators get to watch race on bigscreen realtime. Or on iphone.
Minuses. No more tatty orange and white flags to find. We all need to get a gps microchip implanted in our middle finger. Need to clone MJ Wood.

Unknown said...

And a new skill - keeping a poker face when your chip vibrates.

I'm looking forward to this, it is going to be great.