Mountain climbers reach new virtual heights

HANOVER , N . H . After spending time in Switzerland studying and hiking in the Alps, Dartmouth assistant professor Emily Whiting wanted to relive those climbs back home.

Upon her return to the United States, she and a group of colleagues contemplated how they might recreate the climbs indoors.

Using 3D modelling and digital fabrication, the team developed a system that replicates the hardest stretches of a climb, so that it can be practised on indoor climbing walls. In a presentation at a human computer interaction conference last month, the team demonstrated how it replicated a climb in Rumney, N.H., and a sandstone crag near St. George in Utah.

Fellow post- doctoral scholar Ladislav Kavan, who is now at the University of Utah, did the work out of Utah while Whiting was in New Hampshire.

The two, along with their team, also wanted to address problems that vex many seasoned climbers — the challenges of mastering a route that might be a world away or one that might be too fragile to practice on.

“What if you could take the experience of climbing places like these monuments but not climb the physical thing, actually bring it home to your local gym,” Whiting said. “You would still have the physical experience of climbing it without causing the erosion and damage to the location. There is also the aspect of accessibility, like if this is some place in Thailand or some remote location and you want to train for the route.”

Whiting and her colleagues first did a 3D reconstruction of a wall using hundreds of photos at different angles. Then, they combined that with video showing the climber’s movements. That data helped the researchers identify the key parts of the climb, allowing them to create fabricated holds, which were then attached to a climbing wall.

“When you are climbing it, you’re grasping onto small portions of it and so we wanted to determine where rock climbers actually grabbing onto the rock face,” she said.

There are plenty of tools in climbing gyms to practise, including the campus board, a series of slats that hang on a wall at various angles so that climbers can practise strength training.

The climbers that have given the new system a try say their outdoor ascent matched their experience indoors.

“I was kind of blown away at just how precisely the body movements on the indoor climb recreated the outdoor movements,” said Billy Braasch, a Dartmouth grad student and climber who participated in the study.