Monthly Archives: August 2017

August 1, 2017 Theres not a snowflake in the sky, but Winter Olympic hopefuls are already flying off ski jumps in Utah, firing up their luge sleds in Lake Placid, N.Y., and cross-country skiing past Vermont cow pastures.

With everything from wet suits to wheels to virtual-reality tools, theyre simulating the challenges theyll face at the 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, next February. The perseverance and perfection highlighted on TV for those short few weeks are being honed now, thanks in part to the innovative methods devised by coaches, trainers, and equipment designers.

Keaton McCargo uses the Ski Simulator at the Center of Excellence in Park City, Utah. The simulator can be used in tandem with virtual reality technology that simulates the sensory environment of an alpine ski run.

U.S. Ski & Snowboard

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In some ways the lack of natural snow or ice actually makes for safer, more efficient training. Whereas alpine skiers would spend much of their on-snow training sessions riding the chairlift, for example, a skiing simulator allows them to cut straight to the actual training run. Essentially a lateral treadmill, it mimics the forces skiers contend with while hurtling down mountains and can be used in tandem with virtual-reality technology that replicates the sensory environment of a ski race. A huge bonus: theres no danger of crashing.

What were trying to do is use virtual reality to expand the time that the athletes can spend in their field of play, says Luke Bodensteiner, executive vice president, athletics at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) in Park City, Utah.

But he doesnt want to talk too much about that. Its one of the teams secret weapons heading into Pyeongchang.

Bodensteiner works out of the USSA Center of Excellence, which supports 195 national team athletes with state-of-the-art facilities (including napping areas) and a staff that includes conditioning coaches, dietitians, and physical therapists.

Chris Lillis is one of those athletes, and a rising star on the United States freestyle ski team. Last year he became the youngest male to win a World Cup in aerials skiing at age 17.

Freestyle skier Chris Lillis stands atop a jump at the Utah Olympic Park at the Tri-Nation Aerials Showdown on Sept. 11, 2016. Lillis trains at the facility during the summer and fall, and says that the softer landing afforded by the pool (below) enables him to fit in twice as many training jumps as on snow.

Tyler Tate/T Squared Action Sports

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Five days a week, he averages 25 to 30 jumps off the ramps at the Olympic Park, twisting in the air before landing in a pool. He wears ski boots and skis, and a wet suit in the summer switching to a dry suit in the fall as the temperatures drop, sometimes with sweatpants underneath.

The easier landing means he can do twice as many jumps as he would on snow. But theres a catch.

When we jump on snow the landing we jump on is between 28 and 32 degrees of pitch downwards, so if you land completely flat on water, you would land [wrong] on the snow, he explains, so they have to adjust their technique. You want to land forward to simulate snow.

Abby Ringquist also flies off jumps in Utah sans wet suit. A ski jumper, she cruises down porcelain tracks, springs into position, and floats through the air to land on moistened plastic. When she takes off, her hips must make an arcing motion similar to shooting a basketball your fist is kind of like your hips in ski jumping, explains Ringquist.

To perfect that motion, she also does imitations. Crouching down, she rides a small platform down a rollerboard, and then springs onto a pile of mats. Thats easier than when youre going 60 m.p.h. off a jump, explains Ringquist, who just placed second at US Nationals.

In between training, Lillis and Ringquist chip away at college and work multiple jobs. He works for a public-speaking company and a golf course; she coaches, works at a Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and waits tables at a breakfast restaurant.

None of my travel or equipment or lodging are covered unless its a World Cup weekend. So for me to travel this summer and next winter, its about $20,000, says Ringquist, who lives on a mini-ranch with her husband and their three dogs, two goats, and nine chickens. My plates overflowing, but I do the best I can.

Perhaps one of the hardest elements to replicate in summertime is the distractions of competition day. Take biathlon, for example, which combines cross-country skiing with shooting. As biathletes come into the shooting range, they stream into narrow lanes, pull their guns off their backs, load their ammo, and take aim at their five targets often with competitors right at their elbows.

Youll hear what theyre doing, youll see them out of the corner of your eye, says Susan Dunklee, whose silver at this years World Championships made her the first American woman to win an individual medal at Worlds. You always have to have a plan for when you do get distracted what are you going to do to refocus?

It can be something as simple as focusing on your trigger squeeze, which cant be too quick or too hard, or it will throw the bullet off course. So she practices that in the summertime just her finger and her rifle, getting to know that exact place where the trigger will engage, like the clutch of a car.

And thats just part of it. She also runs, hikes, bikes, and rollerskis through Vermont's rolling hills. Altogether, its up to four hours of training in the morning, and 1.5 hours in the afternoon six days a week. She goes through 17,000 rounds of ammunition a year.

As part of his summer training ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics, Tucker West (l.) practices his luge starts at a refrigerated facility in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Courtesy USA Luge

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Dunklee got her start in biathlon at the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center, where elite athletes can live and eat for free.

Tucker West was recruited there after USA Luge heard about the luge track his dad had built in their backyard in Connecticut, which West would ride down on a plastic sled.

Those who deride luge as not a sport clearly havent heard about Wests workout regimen.

After 30 to 60 minutes of jogging and stretching, he shows up by 9 a.m.at a refrigerated facility with a short luge starting ramp equipped with starting gates and precision timing. He pulls six to 12 starts, then its off to the gym for an hour-long plyometric workout.

He eats lunch in 10 minutes no dessert and then one to three hours of lifting. Power cleans, power snatch, power jerks. And hanging by his fingers. All for those first few seconds when hell pull himself off the start and then use his hands to paddle down the icy track.

Sometimes they put wheels on their sleds and go down the streets of Lake Placid or even the actual luge tracks but thats too risky for an Olympic year. After stretching, massage, and other recovery methods, he eats dinner at 5 p.m. and then chips away at online college classes.

In bed by 10:30 to 11, he says. And then repeat.

With 192 days to go until the Pyeongchang Olympics opening ceremony, athletes from Lake Placid to Latvia have a lot of training ahead of them before the global spotlight is flicked on. Then, the world will see the fruits of their labors and maybe another little boy and his dad will be inspired to build something in their backyard, with a distant Olympics in mind.

Staff writer Story Hinckley contributed reporting.

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How Winter Olympians prep in summertime: wheels, wet suits, and virtual reality - Christian Science Monitor

Your third life is here (in beta).

The SF-based Linden Lab is at last launching an open creator beta of its VR-ready universe simulation, Sansar.The world creation and exploration title is expansive in its ambitions and still has a long way to go. After a lengthy creator preview in which early access was given to a couple thousand creators, there are 1,700 worlds to explore (some better than others, I imagine).

While last weeks surprise shutdown announcement for AltspaceVR, a social VR company that raised nearly $15 million, is still fresh on the minds, Linden Lab has the flexibility of profitability to help it guide its long-term vision for Sansar.

The company behind Second Life, a game which seemingly lost its wider cultural relevance more than a decade ago, has managed to make a ton of money as the titles most devoted lifers have continued to shovel cash into the online simulation. Despite the nascent nature of the VR market, the company has shifted its focus to building Sansar, though Second Life will continue on as a unique, separate entity.

Linden Lab has the luxury of monetizing world creation from the very beginning. In Second Life, users pay a pretty hefty amount in order to rent land while things beyond that stay relatively cheap otherwise. For Sansar, the land you build on is free (for your first few worlds); the costs start stacking up when you visit the asset store to populate those worlds with objects. If youre a budding 3D designer with time to spare, you can create a world customized to your liking on your own, but for those looking to drop a stock object like, say, a chair in their virtual home, they can drop some in-game coin on the product.

The company isnt looking to be very subtle with its ambitions of creating a wide network of explorable worlds that will grow to rival reality. Over my last several meetings, the company has not shied away from discussions of metaverses and simulations. In our latest meeting, a copy of Ready Player One sat unacknowledged on the table in the conference room, broadcasting its ambitions further without saying too much.

Whats launching today is very much a beta product of what Sansar will grow to become, but the experience is oddly so polished in some areas while sorely lacking in others. As-is, Sansar allows virtual reality users a wide swath of user-created worlds to explore and the potential to build their own whats missing are the tools to make exploring these arenas more interactive.

Unlike most VR developers, Linden Lab opted not to rely on an existing game engine like Unity or Unreal but instead built their own custom engine for Sansar thats wholly separate from what they built for Second Life. The limitations are pretty apparent early on, and while it is possible to build beautiful static worlds in Sansar, as an explorer youre ultimately left with a sort of three-dimensional board game to traverse thats generally only made dynamic by the multiplayer aspect. You can toss things like a basketball in some experiences, but the physics and controls themselves have a long ways to go.

Today, Sansar goes live on the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, as well as 2D desktop experience on PCs.

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Second Life creator launches beta of its virtual reality simulation - TechCrunch

Virtual reality in movie theaters and malls is about to get a whole lot more realistic, thanks to new tracking technology introduced by OptiTrack this week. The company, which is already supplying tracking solutions to The Void and other location-based VR startups, introduced a new whole-body VR tracking solution at SigGraph in Los Angeles Monday that could be one more step towards making loction-based virtual reality mainstream.

The new solution is based on a kind of puck that players in VR centers and arcades can attach to their hands and feet. Combined with any data gathered from tracking their VR headsets and any additional equipment, these pucks will help to enable whole-body tracking in multiplayer virtual reality worlds.

OptiTrack started selling its 3D tracking solutions into multiple industries about a decade ago. The companys customers include visual effects companies, which use OptiTracks technology to add some human touch to animated characters by putting real-life actors and athletes into motion capture suits, among other things.

A few years ago, OptiTracks executives realized that they could sell the same technology to VR companies as well, in part because all of the hardware vendors in the emerging VR world were specializing on non-commercial applications. Oculus and Vive have both very good trackers but they are limited to room-scale, said OptiTrack Chief Strategy Officer Brian Niles during a recent interview with Variety.

VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive offer positional tracking to accurately reproduce movements in a 3D space, but both are currently restricted to a areas measuring between 100 and 150 square-feet big enough for a living room, but not for a VR center. Thats why OptiTrack repurposed some of its technology to work in significantly larger spaces, measuring 10,000 square feet and beyond.

In addition to bigger areas, OptiTracks tech also allows VR center operators to track a much wider range of props to make sure that flashlights, guns and other objects you might pick up in a VR experience are accurately represented in the virtual world. And now, the company is extending this kind of tracking to the players themselves, allowing multi-player experiences to accurately relay the movements of all players in VR. This is the first skeletal tracking of these players, said Niles.

OptiTrack also introduced self-calibrating tracking systems at SigGraph Monday, which could further simplify the operation of VR arcades. Motion tracking, whether used in the context of VR or for visual effects, has long required frequent calibration of the cameras used. Operators typically re-calibrate their sets every single day to account for small structural movements, which requires employees to walk through the space and wave a special wand to make sure that all cameras still track everything accurately.

Now, OptiTracks systems can do this kind of calibration by themselves, while in use. This may sound like a small advancement, but it could be a big deal in a nascent industry that is trying bring VR to thousands of malls and movie theaters without having to hire expensive specialists for every single location. High school students will be able to run this, said Niles.

Correction 12:01pm: A previous version of this story misstated the size of spaces OtiTracks solution is capable of tracking.

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New Technology Brings Skeletal Tracking to Multi-Player Virtual Reality Experiences - Variety

As the world's tech giants invest heavily in virtual reality, the relatively few workers who specialize in the nascent field are seeing big benefits.

Demand for online freelancers with VR expertise grew far faster than for people with any other skill last quarter. Billings on VR projects grew more than 30-fold from the same period a year earlier, according to U.S. data provided by Upwork Inc.'s website that connects freelancers with employers.

VR has so far struggled to break into the mainstream, with the technology largely confined to high-end video gaming. Facebook Inc., which bought VR headset maker Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion, has already been lowering prices for the Oculus headset and is working on a more consumer-friendly version to be sold next year. Other companies that make VR goggles include Samsung Electronics Co., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Sony Corp.

Overall, tech-related skills accounted for nearly two-thirds of Upworks list of the 20 fastest-growing skills. Specialties related to artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing, neural networks and image processing, dominated the top of the list. People who specialize in econometrics, a subspecialty of economics that involves building mathematical models to explain and predict the real world, also saw a big spike in demand for their work.

To be sure, the market for many of these kinds of workers is still small, growing from a pool that was basically nonexistent just a year ago. For example, there are just over 2,500 freelancers on Upworks site now who list VR as one of their skills, compared with 106 individuals at this point last year.

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This Is the Fastest-Growing Skill Demanded of Online Freelancers - Fortune