Live-tracking the Red Bull X-Alps 2019
We tracked 32 athletes on an interactive map in 2D and 3D – for an immersive sports experience.
Scalable sports event marketing with Google Cloud and Google Maps
Experiencing sports events up close and personal, from home or on the road: that's what many fans dream of. But how do you manage to get the audience right in the middle of the action? For the adventure race Red Bull X-Alps 2019, we developed a web application with which fans were able to follow the action live at any time – in 2D and 3D.
Experience extreme sports immersively
Red Bull X-Alps 2019 is a race of superlatives. In June, 32 athletes crossed the Alps from Salzburg to Monaco on foot and with their paragliders, checking 13 waypoints. In cooperation with zooom we built a web application with 2D and 3D maps on which the athletes were tracked live. A special highlight was the "cockpit mode", in which viewers could follow the paragliding flights from a first-person perspective. An experience that brought fans closer to the athletes than ever before. Additional information about the athletes, race statistics, and the integration of social media content made the application a truly immersive sports experience.
Preparation and visualization of real-time tracking data
32 athletes tracking their every move with a GPS device for two weeks – that's a lot of data. For the visualization, we had to prepare and process it first. This way, we derived the most relevant information for the fans and visualize it in real time: Where exactly are the athletes right now, have they already passed the last checkpoint, are they currently on foot or are they flying with their paraglider? With this, we were able to draw the track of the athletes in 2D and 3D on the map and assign them different icons depending on their current type of movement. This made it easier for the viewers to follow the live action. With the movement data, we were also able to calculate the overall ranking as well as individual athlete's statistics.
Scalable sports marketing with the help of Google Cloud
Due to the large amount of data and the additional challenge of real-time visualization, we decided to use a combination of Google Cloud and Google Maps services. The chosen architecture enabled the fast processing and visualization of the live tracking data and guaranteed the reliable performance of the web application even with high user traffic at the start and end of the race.
Check out Red Bull X-Alps