Velochimp: Astrochimp on Cycling

CSC is putting some of its technology on display at the Tour of California. Several riders will wear an OmniLocation device that can track the racers in real time. As WIRED News reports the device is more than a GPS:

“This is more than just GPS,” says CSC’s Identity Labs chief technologist Dan Munyan. “This is object field tracking. We want to be able to focus on a field of objects in motion, looking not only at where they are on the route, but also where they are relative to each other.

“It’s much cooler than the nüvi in your car telling you when to turn left and right,” he says.

The CSC solution brings together the smallest GPS trackers, the fastest data transmission system and the most accurate software. CSC provides an application that includes a dynamic mapping application that keeps an entire group of objects in view as they move through the landscape.

The application is able to track multiple objects in close proximity, with changing perspectives and orientation to see the entire race field while still receiving ground-level information on the riders. OmniLocation is so accurate that fans following the race online will be able to know exactly where the tracked riders are within a three-meter margin.

The tiny devices weigh about 3 ounces each — slightly less than a Motorola Razr phone. In fact, CSC’s OmniLocation devices are essentially miniature mobiles that have been hacked to send a constant stream of geodata to a GSM network.

The tour’s top five cyclists will be tagged with the devices during each of the race’s stages. Additionally, one rider from Team CSC and one rider from T-Mobile’s cycling team will carry a location device every day. The system uses a complicated home-brew combination of GPS data, general packet radio service signals, HTTP streaming and SMS messaging to send data to and from the network of about 20 GPS satellites.

The system can pinpoint a rider’s position within just a few yards, which is much more accurate than plain GPS, which is accurate only to within about 65 feet.

Once collected, the geodata will be made available to web spectators in three ways.

CSC will provide a full-screen map of the riders’ whereabouts through a web application it created using Google Maps. To appease the true geodata nuts, CSC will also publish a KML file (an XML-based mapping language) that fans can plug into Google Earth to generate their own custom maps of the race. The official Tour of California website will host a live race-tracking page using Yahoo Maps and Adobe Presentation software.

–WIRED News

WIRED News | CSC OmniLocation