GPS To Be Used Extensively at Tour of California

When the Amgen Tour of California blasts through California towns at 30 mph next week, you should do what any respectable bike racing fan does -- stand on the side of the road and cheer until you're blue in the face. But if you aren't lucky enough to see the riders up close, just follow the race on Google Earth.

(image courtesy of CSC)

During this year's edition of the pro cycling race, the Computer Sciences Corporation, or CSC, will outfit seven contenders with specially designed tracking devices. Information about the riders' locations and relative positions in the race will be made available as a map mashup during each of the tour's eight daylong stages.

CSC -- which is a sponsor of the tour and the title sponsor of Team CSC, one of 20 teams in cycling's elite ProTour league -- is hoping that its new technology will give cycling's rabid fan base a more immersive view of the sport.

"This is more than just GPS," says CSC's Identity Labs chief technologist Dan Munyan. "This is object field tracking. We want to be able to focus on a field of objects in motion, looking not only at where they are on the route, but also where they are relative to each other.

Once collected, the geodata will be made available to web spectators in three ways:

CSC will provide a full-screen map of the riders' whereabouts through a web application it created using Google Maps. To appease the true geodata nuts, CSC will also publish a KML file (an XML-based mapping language) that fans can plug into Google Earth to generate their own custom maps of the race. The official Tour of California website will host a live race-tracking page using Yahoo Maps and Adobe Presentation software.

The race's web spectators will have access to almost-real-time location information for the riders as they cruise down the California coast -- a short delay will offset the feed by about 10 seconds.

Source: Wired News: Bike Racers Gear Up With Geodata

Cool! I know I'll be watching it all unfold on VS, with coverage of the next 8 days! Woohoo! Cycling coverage!

Take care,

Steve (aka Cheeseflavor)