Velochimp: Astrochimp on Cycling

Following the Tour of California Tour Tracker, the same technology will be used for the The Tour de Georgia Tour Tracker.

Allan Padgett of Adobe was originally involved in building the Tour of California Tour Tracker. He provided details on how it was built using the Adobe Flex Framework. The entire app was built within 4 weeks with only one or so developers. They were also using beta technology that was not fully tested. Cell phones were used to constantly broadcast GPS positions of riders. This was complicated at times when the course would run through areas where T-Mobile coverage was spotty or non-existent.

Allan even built a live Tour Tracker for the US Open Cycling Championships using only GPS data, no live video.

Needless to say there were bugs that needed to be worked out. Despite all of the issues the Tour Tracker did a great job of getting information on the bike races in real time. Something to geek out on while sitting at your desk.

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The Amgen Tour of California site seems to always come up with very innovative ways to show the race. Last year the Tour Tracker provided real time pictures and some video to help with the race coverage. This year the Tour Tracker made a technological jump by providing live streaming video in a dashboard that overlays the course profile, GPS location and live flickr photos.

The combo is very impressive. The video is in full screen mode which makes the picture a bit pixelated, but can be accommodated by resizing the screen to a smaller size. The video feed is fairly smooth for web videos. Just about the same quality that you would get on Youtube. I am impressed with their decision to go full screen which looks very slick. (Sorry for the Bob Roll-like gushing)

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