LetsGoOutside

Nice tool for wingsuiting, maybe? http://contour.com/?utm_source=Contour+Customers

I now do all my foot launching with my ITV Bip Bip 16. Haven't had a ton of time with it yet, but thus far it seems like an extremely well rounded wing touching both ends of the speedflying and paragliding spectrum. I have a Nova 135 with big grab toggles in a custom "unpacked" BASE rig. I've thrown a Sabre2 107 and Katana 97 on there many times, as well. Sabre2 was great for 15+ knots winds, and Katana was more of novelty for taking on super high winds that no one should fly. This was my primary rig for years and despite what anyone says, it was solid and safe. I now use it to show my skydiving friends how to kite (since four risers is often a bit much at first) and launch at "safe" hills (~30°, grassy and soft with no obstacles). And I'm sure I'll fly it again for shits and giggles. That Nova 135 is like the easiest thing to get off the ground.

Does Matter still make wingsuits? They're probably more relevant than Jii (which is not very).

Have you ever flown at least any of them? I did. V3 is an agile suit and X-Wing is a dragster. In other words after jumping Stealth a lot, V3 was very easy to fly and X-Wing was really difficult for me. They are still not comparable just in skydiving distance or glide ratio competition. I would not even think about jumping BASE with X-wing. http://picasaweb.google.com/gabor.szelei/XWing?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiLzYel27XlZg# http://picasaweb.google.com/gabor.szelei/Skydive2009# Have to agree here. It's not about what you can graph after a flight, it's what it feels like in the air. Vampire series really is a class all its own there.

Nice footage and flights. Shame that it's all put in the context of such ego and imagined competition. It would make a really great video otherwise. :/

Yeah, Fly Your Body makes fantastic suits. The other guys might make suits that can outglide, but FYB probably out paces the rest in making suits that are agile and intuitive.

In super slow mo, the forward speed looks to be about that of the bigger Tony suits. For real.

Hmmm... might be worth sending to PD for inspection then. Even when my spectra was going out of trim (on HMA now) my off-heading rate was way less than that. Have fun with the FX!

Totes. Arch for instability, but ball for a spin. The ball kills the rotation speed before it gets out of hand, whereas an uneven arch can induce a pinwheel effect and make it much worse.

What kind of line do you have? HMA 500 seems to give noticeably better openings on the KA. Don't cover the nose or shove it into the pack job, either, The canopy has a decent opening duration as is, so doing anything to slow it down will likely affect heading. I've got 400+ Katana openings/flights with a wingsuit without issue. No Neos experience, but can tell you the Katana and Crossfire are basically in different classes from each other. Katana is a beast. Much faster and more aggressive flight than the Crossfire. Crossfire is the more well-rounded canopy. Katana (my preference) needs a bit more attention. Not quite Velocity, but close-ish.

Get on level vertically, and then approach horizontally. This is the rule for all formations. Never approach both planes at the same time. But it sounds like they could have even been doing that but lost sight of each other. Sucks.

Go for it. It's all you.

This is getting way off track. If tomography was even applicable for this application, and if you did film from two angles with GPS on the flyers -- it'd be nearly impossible to calibrate time, GPS, and images in the video to result in useful data. For exceptionally shaped formations, make an exception and do it by hand. For anything that has a pattern, we can feed it to a computer. Baby steps. Start with formations on one level with basic patterns (where triangles can be formed between jumpers), and then let's move on from there.

The cameras need to be looking the *exact* same direction with the *exact* same orientation. Think of looking straight forward with your eyes. Compare that with crossing your eyes. When you look straight forward, you get two slightly different variations on the same image that you can make sense of to create depth, because pieces of each image overlap. When you cross your eyes, it's just two very different images that you can't make sense out of. The logic to writing a program that can create depth from two images is very close to what our brains do. You need to find objects in each image and then see how much they overlap horizontally. That amount of overlap gives your brain (or the program) the info it needs to calculate distance (relative to other objects in view). The images have to be very, very similar to perform depth calculations. Unfortunately, cameras aren't as high resolution as our eyeballs and it's tough to write software as smart as our brains, so trying to accurately judge depths across wide spans or great distances is basically not an option with current technology.

I concur. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the only practical way to do it is jumpers against the sky. I've done depth with "stereo" imaging, as well -- both with two cameras and the "slide" technique with one camera. It's far from reliable/accurate, and is not really intended to work on the distances we're talking about here (it's generally accurate for a few feet out). You can do some cool illusions with it, but it's not something I would trust to judge 3D formations. You would need to the cameras to be several feet apart (further than the wingspan of any one jumper), almost perfectly parallel to the formation, to get anywhere near an accurate depth calculation. Real easy... film against the sky, convert the image to greyscale, and let the jumpers' shadows form the blobs. Dead simple, really. No need to over-complicate things with velocity tracking, stereo imaging, etc. Doesn't really apply to calculating angles between jumpers in any given frame. So let's start at step 1 -- get some footage and modify Magnetic to pick jumpers out of the sky. Then we can go from there.

Good question. Asymmetrical, yes. Potential success/failure would be based on angle of lines/triangles between flyers -- not overall shape. Different levels... hmmm... depends. Right... I was thinking there would be an indicator in real time that a formation was complete, but a BMP would be bounced out for verification. I'm not sure how that would apply here, but yes. Each "blob" contains its current and previous position. You can use this difference to get angle and velocity. Magnetic itself wouldn't do the prediction, but the application built atop it could. I see what you're saying, but there's no need to get that complicated. By applying a slight blur, dilating the pixels, and getting the right (color) threshold setting, you essentially get the same result. Doesn't take much processor at all. You'd be surprised. The app always outpaces the video. For my purposes, it has to, because I generally write this for interactive pieces. But I'm thinking we could do something even simpler than all this. A flock filmed from below against the bright sky is very, very easy to separate from the background by converting the image to grey scale and setting the threshold. Magnetic already does this. Unfortunately, I'm swamped with the day job. However, I'd love to see this happen and want to help how I can. As I mentioned, if we set it up so that the video used for judging is always shot from below, looking up against the sky, then you can use Magnetic as is (well, slight tweaking to use video file instead of live video). But if it needs to work with color (ie, video is from above looking down), it will be more complicated and very time consuming. I think the first step is to get some video to work with. If anyone has some good flock formation video shot from below, please PM me and send video my way. I'll use the video to get a project started that can detect flyers. Once I've got the CV side complete, I could hand it off to anyone who wants to write the triangle/line logic explained previously. I'd make myself available to answer questions, but I don't foresee being able to get in and do the full development/testing. Just too slammed right now. Any takers?

+1 This was the way to create a maximum sized burble. I'd rather pull from full flight. +2

I should also mention that this could work in real time with live video, in case the camera person wants to use a tiny computer and an Arduino board hooked up to a LED to indicate when the formation is complete while in freefall. :D

Yeah, I think i could analyze the "border" for an average color and use some tolerance tweaking to differentiate bodies from background. Shooting from below would be much better than above, as the sky has less variation to work out than the ground (unless you're over desert, etc). Let's say the average background hue after applying a little blur is 0x7093A6. On each pixel, I bit shift out the RGB values and compare the pixel color to the average background. If the color of the current pixel is off by more than, say, 16, we turn it white to represent part of a flyer. If the color is inside the tolerance, we turn it black to represent the background. With the image converted to black and white, we can look for blobs (the shapes the white parts form) as I already do in Magnetic. This will give us size, outline nodes, centroid (accurate center of blob), and peak data (head, hands, feet). Much like the calibration in Magnetic (which corrects for lens distortion), you could undistort video from wide angle lens, correct for angle, etc, so that the centroids "flatten" out (kind of like making a flat map of Earth). All you really need is the centroid, or center. By connecting each center to the next closest center in the "flat" image, you can create triangles and/or lines. Use these nodes to analyze the overall shape of the formation and triangulate the grid. Compare the center of each flyer to the connecting points in the grid. If the centroid is within x% of the formation size, it qualifies. If all nodes are within this range, we can pause the video or maybe spit out an image. The frame would show the raw video, the centroids, and the grid. Out of bounds flyers would be noted. Since we have the outline data, we could actually highlight their whole body so everyone knows who screwed up. ;) I know that's a long post, but this is what's on my mind. Based on experience with similar projects, I know for sure this process would actually work.

I write computer vision software in C++. I'm wondering if I might be able to leverage this into auto-formation recognition software. Here's a framework I developed called "Magnetic". It's used most for multi-touch and augmented reality, but note that it can track finger tips, head position, etc. And check how I'm doing the calibration, which is a very similar grid system. Video: http://vimeo.com/10220241 I'm thinking that you would load up the video and let it play. Every frame would be analyzed (note, I get about 60 - 100fps with this framework, so no sweat on speed). When a formation within proposed guidelines is recognized, the video pauses on the successful frame... maybe bounces out an image with the overlay. And of course have some manual stuff going on, as well (much like the manual calibration in the video). If nothing else, I could hand Magnetic off to any C++/openFrameworks developer out there that wants to pursue it.

Jesus, why do people feel compelled to film banter on the ground and the whole damn ride up? Boring...

True, but a flat trim usually means a faster recovery. There are other factors, of course, but trim is a big one. Yeah, Stilettos flatten out pretty quickly.

BTW, I believe the annual award goes back a couple years, no?

Nice one! Glad to know my vote actually counted. :D

Hmmm... textbook definition of a "dick". Thanks for the clarification.