The RedBull X-Alps is the world's greatest hike and fly paragliding adventure race. With a 1,283km long course through the European alps, 33 pilots from 17 countries took part in a gruelling race of endurance, skill and adventure.
The event is the ultimate challenge, and not just for the pilots. Live video streams, live commentary, live tracking with 3D viewing all need to come together, with tens of thousands of people all trying to watch at the same time. That's one reason they have 'the prologue', a single day practice event a few days before the main event starts.
The official live tracking had a few issues during the prologue, as anyone who watched the live stream was aware of. After this PureTrack was contacted by the organisers to ask if PureTrack could be used as a backup tracking system, incase of technical failure during the main event. We were happy to help any way we could.
We set to task, making PureTrack as ready as it could be. I worked with Naviter who were suppling the awesome Naviter Omni devices to each pilot, to get the data from those devices into PureTrack. These worked with FANET and FLARM, and each was online with its own cellular data. If one was out of signal range, it would be able to talk to a nearby neighbour who might have signal.
The competitors also each had a Garmin InReach Mini. PureTrack is designed to handle any number of tracking devices for each pilot, so we configured each Omni and InReach for each competitor to send data to PureTrack. This provided an independent system from the official tracking system, and two tracking devices for each pilot.
A few pilots also used PureTrack with their personal devices and varios, so were able to feed their flight instruments into the system too.
Thankfully the official live tracking worked with only minor issues so PureTrack was never called on officially. The PureTrack website still ended up with thousands of viewers watching the race every day. Some people had issues with the official 3D tracking being too taxing for their phones, so PureTrack was a good 2D alternative.
Over the week we improved a number of things to make the watching experience better, including:
On the day of the first finisher, we had over 23,000 people watching live on PureTrack!
It was a great event, and was thrilling to watch from the side of the world. It gave us a big opportunity to test and push PureTrack to its limits, and improve a number of things along the way. PureTrack is now much better placed to handle more load for future events.
If you're interested in using PureTrack to provide tracking for your event, get in touch, we'd be happy to help.
