Firstly, I have only been using Swift for a few days and I have to say, its one of the only reasons I went out to buy a Real Turbo Muin as I know that I wouldn’t get bored of indoor training. Prior to this I was an avid WattBike user but hated the rides!
What I would love to see firstly is more Islands which I am expecting will happen with the full release.
Assuming that their is a back end data pool and API.s which you use to design courses I think it would be great to give the riders the ability to design their own courses… This could maybe be an additional services, but my thoughts are the following.
a high line easy to use GUI to build elevation hills and declines an a course that a rider wishes to ride. As an example I have an event next year I would like to train for, I can take a view of the course on map my ride for example and have a high level understanding of the inclines and where they occur. Take this knowledge and build my own…
I think this would be fun, but should be limited to real world locations using GPX data for example.
The hard bit will be texturing, placing all the scenery around and making it look like a real location though. I used to make Doom then Quake 3 maps - took ages!
I think building a generic course based on a gpx created on something like ridewithgps would be amazing, if your not worried about graphical reproductions of the area but would like to train for an event then I’d certainly pay extra to have this ability, ghost riders could be based on a variant between a max and min finish time.
If you go down the Google Maps route, you’ll have to pay an annual subscription to Google for the pleasure (like I did with my Tacx Genius!) It would be great to be able to use downloaded GPX data to ride routes etc. though… Good call
there’s also open street maps, which is open source GIS data. the benefit of google earth/maps is that you can use Sketchup to model the buildings and use street view data for textures. From the GPX/TCX data you can roughly estimate the course, but given GPS drift the elevation data could have significant error. You’d always want to adjust the route and snap them to GIS data, which can be more reliable. In theory, if someone made google street view like camera rig, you could mount it on your car to create the course. This way, you’d have high res textures and use machine vision to rough out environmental features. There are drones that do this type of stuff on the market already for aerial surveying. OpenCV has features that can make this kind of stuff easier
Just do what BKool already does with their 3D rendering engine from a GPX (just can’t use raw Strava data as Strava drops the elevation data - logged that issue with Strava last fall). The ability to put in your own real course no matter how many people use it is pretty important for those of us who might travel to a location for a once in a lifetime ride or event. I have a coworker who does this to train for triathlons and an iron man, they get they cycle course down pat ahead of time, save for the actual turns/leans. I’d love to try out a few of the mountain rides on the trainer before I attempt it (like climbing Mt Washington in NH for instance).
Just open up the tools the team is using already internally…then have a preview/voting system to get some of them on the schedule each month…the community can pick which ones are good enough to try out…
