LiveSailing for Professionals

LS4P Overview

LiveSailing background

Over the years, BeTomorrow has been developing intensively the LiveSailing ‘Mass Market’ edition: With such a an offer, everybody can follow , on a mobile phone, a personal computer or a TV, a real sailing race in virtual 3D images on a 4 to 15 seconds delay only.

The images/videos are reconstructed in 3D thanks to the GPS positions of the real boats and augmented with key racing information computed automatically by the LiveSailing software platform.

A GPS tracking unit on a sailing boat (Beijing Olympics Games 2008)

generated images in real-time (Beijing Olympics Games 2008)

3D generated images in real-time (Beijing Olympics Games 2008)

With such a system, BeTomorrow won several world class prizes, including the Best mobile’s sports Infotainment Awards at 3G World Congress (Barcelona 2006) and the best video application at Sportel (Monaco 2006). The company also confirmed its pole market position when it was selected for the broadcasting of the most prestigious sailing events in the five past years: Athens 2004 Olympics for Swatch, Velux 5 Oceans, America’s Cup 2005/ 2006 / 2007 , Fastnet, Barcelona World Race, Artemis Transat, Sail for Gold 2007, Québec/Saint Malo, Beijing Olympic Games for Omega, Vendée Globe and OmanSail Round the World 2009.

But the standard GPS terminals that BeTomorrow used to work with for the ‘mass market’ LiveSailing edition revealed a lack of positioning accuracy and reliability that wouldn't satisfy higher requirements. Even in that last case, positioning accuracy was barely good enough and it often happened that the BeTomorrow's team had to correct data manually in real time to ensure that the boats correctly turn around the buoys on the virtual images as they actually do in reality. Moreover, the positioning information on the various boats was not precise enough to practically infirm from the GPS measurements that one boat had not made a false start.

LS4P objectives

The future availability of the EGNOS and European GNSS systems now paves the way for much more precise and reliable (integer) positioning capabilities which offer in turn new perspectives for the development of a range of innovative LiveSailing for Professionals (LS4P) applications:

For sailing race competitors, to give them the opportunity to increase their performances thanks to a highly accurate position and velocity measurement. Sailors and coaches will be able to replay the whole race to assess practically how far they are from the theorical maximum performance of their boats. They will also have the opportunity to compare their trajectory to an ideal route computed by the LiveSailing system based on the real measurement of wind and sea conditions all along the race duration.
For regattas organizers: with high precision and reliable positioning systems, the LiveSailing for Professionals application will become a key component of the official racing chronometers which will be used by regattas organizers to detect false departures, to control the correct passages around buoys and even to automatically support the ranking of race competitors with a high enough reliability.

In the past years, BeTomorrow has been developing intensively the LiveSailing ‘Mass Market’ edition: With such a an offer, everybody can follow , from his mobile phone, personal computer or TV, a real sailing race with 15 seconds of delay on a virtual 3D image.

The images/videos are reconstructed in 3D thanks to the GPS positions of the real boats and augmented with key racing information computed automatically by the LiveSailing software platform

Figure 1 A GPS tracking unit on a sailing boat (Beijing Olympics Games 2008)

Figure 2 3D generated images in real-time (Beijing Olympics Games 2008)

During such events, BeTomorrow had the opportunity to work in close collaboration with numerous international sailing teams and regattas organizers who all demonstrated a strong interest in the functionalities brought about by the LiveSailing platform for better monitoring regattas. But the standard GPS terminals that BeTomorrow commonly used for this ‘mass market’ LiveSailing edition revealed not to offer enough positioning accuracy and reliability to meet more severe requirements than the ones needed for race event broadcasting. Even in that last case, positioning accuracy was hardly good enough and it often happened that the BeTomorrow team had to add manual corrections in real time in order to make sure that the boats appeared to overtake the buoys on the virtual images as they actually did in reality. Moreover, the positioning information of the various boats was not precise enough to practically infirm from the GPS measurements that one boat had not made a wrong start.