Russian 3D Aerosport Visualisation

The first Russian 3D-service of an aerosport visualisation (Airtribune.com) is created and successfully tested at the Russian Paragliding Open 2011 Championship held in Turkey (Denizli, 1st to 7th May 2011). The backbone of this service consist of detailed images depicting the competition locations and the software for 3D visualisation, developed by ScanEx, Russia. Space images of the competition territory in Turkey were provided by Astrium Geo-information Services.

Airtribune.com enables to provide a comprehensive information support of any kind of aerosport competitions. The application has the option to register pilots, to monitor their relocations during the competition, to upload flight points, to broadcast the events in real-time via Internet, etc. Thanks to Airtribune.com, the Russian Paragliding Open is now being watched on-line via the Internet by more than 300 people per day, according to the website statistics.

Due to flight altitudes (2,000-4,000m) and distances (up to 100 km) that are covered by the pilots daily, the possibilities to watch the paragliders were seriously restricted until recently. This Russian Championship can be regarded as revolutionary: for the first time we obtained the possibility to demonstrate the tactical fight between the pilots during the race, to show waypoints that a pilot has to “clear”. Thanks to the new web-service the spectators get inside a virtual air tribune that cover a huge 3D space, where the race takes place, says Alexei Tarakanov, Airtribune.com Project Head, the professional paraglider, the leader among Russian sportsmen according to the FAI international rating of pilots (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale).

The live leader board on the Airtribune.com website is permanently updated. The data about the distance left to finish for each pilot is displayed in real-time. Information about the height and speed of the pilots is also published. Formerly, the pilots had to hand in their trackers to the jury upon completion of flights and wait for their manual processing to get the results of each competition day.

Russian Paragliding Open organizer Nikolai Bragin assured that Airtribune.com service contributed to increasing the safety level of the races and improving the operations of the pilots pickup service. “We always know, where a pilot is located at the moment. Despite the fact that web-service is still working in test mode, a lot of spectators were able to watch the races through Internet, to communicate and to exchange print screens. Such information technology innovations will make the aerosport more spectacular and also will help attracting new partners to the competitions”.