Pebble AR Finder
Overview
An augmented reality experience that helps climbers discover outdoor climbing routes. Point your phone at a crag and the AR overlay shows route information, grades, and directions.
Technical Details
- Built with ViroReact for cross-platform AR support
- GPS-based geolocation for outdoor route discovery
- Image recognition for indoor navigation and route identification
- Real-time overlay rendering with smooth camera tracking
Motivation
Pebble has a wiki-style outdoor guidebook feature. It allows users to add climbs and information about them. But, often, when looking at a map, it's hard to know exactly where the routes are. I wanted to make it easier for climbers to find routes, especially if they're in obscure areas without obvious trails. Having a view in the app that you could use to look around and see where the climbs are seemed like a natural solution.
Results
Using viroreact made AR pretty easy in React Native. It worked especially well for those looking to find routes in the backcountry.
We also tried using AR in the climbing gym by using image recognition to identify the starting holds of a route. But, for this, the wear a climbing hold sees over it's life, with chalk and rubber accumulation made it hard for the model to reliably identify holds over time. It also was unnecessary because the routes in the gym are already well organized in the app.
