Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Something for the techno geeks


I've been fiddling around with cameras again. Some time ago I noticed people matching their GPS track to their videos so I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to do the same. It turned out that a couple of apps I'd been keen on trying were off the air, although I eventually found the simple but powerful Suffervision which enabled me to easily synchronise a Strava ride with a video posted on Youtube and visualise data such as speed, heart rate and cadence as a rather neat heads-up style display. I managed to eke more than an hour out of a GoPro battery this morning and record an entire 30km ride. The result can be seen here, although be warned it's long and while I find it fascinating, I freely acknowledge it may not be that riveting after the first few minutes for others. Particularly cool is the ability to zoom in on the map display and follow the little dot as it zooms along. Pardon the video quality on the longer sample, this shorter version is at a higher resolution, plus a bit of traffic to make things more interesting.


It got me thinking to how far technology has come for cyclists in the last few years. I think it's a safe prediction that video cameras will become commonplace for cyclists within the next five years. I suspect that many of us will have front and rear cameras overlaying just this sort of data, not for the purposes of showing off, but to enhance our safety. I'd expect they will be relatively cheap, record in high definition and long battery life and large storage capacity. I wonder how much ubiquitous video recording on bicycles might influence driver behaviour. I suspect it might lead to an improvement if evidence of the misdeeds visited upon cyclists was both readily available and compelling.

5,806km so far this year.

2 comments:

Googy55 said...

Fascinating stuff Dave. I've been contemplating getting a Gopro. Your really wetting my apetite

David Killick said...

They're pretty cool. I can't afford one right now, but I would buy one if I could. I'll have to wait a bit but the likelihood is that they will come down in size and price pretty quickly over time.