Red Bull Rampage brings extreme bike racing to your living room
Sports
21 bike riders fly down a mountain in around a minute.
This is Red Bull Rampage, an extreme mountain bike competition in Utah.
For the first time, you can get up close and personal with the riders in augmented reality without leaving your couch.
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Using Android or iPhone, viewers can place a 3D model of the mountain in their living rooms, and interact with the ride through the Redbull TV app.
It relays to the viewer the size and the scale and the ruggedness of this environment, but it also provides a big pallette.
Where we can drop little pins and we can add little animations and things that are a little gamified are fun.
Like the event, the technology required to map the mountain also had to be extreme.
A DGI Matriest drone with 100 megapizel camera flew around the mountain to capture over 1,000 high resolution photos.
Then, using a technique called phtogramatry, a three D model of the course was made.
But that only gave a view of the mountain before the event started.
To get other perspectives during their runs, four 360 degree cameras were placed around the course so viewers could see riders pass by.
You can actually go to that live streaming camera at the top of the mountain and get that live preview as if you're standing beside the rider.
Taking in that vista.
To deal with the bandwidth needed for streaming 4K footage live, the team brought in a satellite.
And because the conditions on the mountain were so rugged, the cameras also had to withstand the elements.
They're very small and cast out of aluminum, so they can kind of handle the rigors of what we have to deal with and not have to worry much about Vibration, about rain, about dust and things like that.
Other major sporting events have experimented with AR apps before, like the PGA, but Red Bull's experience is more sophisticated.
And it also has some hidden surprises to look out for.
There's a lot of different [UNKNOWN] where there's a helicopter flying around which is oddly satisfying when you find it, pick it up, and it's kind of floating around your living room.
You can track it and follow it While the rampage is over for another year, you can still experience all the thrills and spills with replays and the ARL elements in the app.
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