Saturday, October 13, 2012

US Weather Radar now as standalone webpage


The popular US Weather Radar Gadget has been ported to a stand-alone webpage. Please check it out at Weather NG.

Now the US Weather Radar can be viewed as normal webpage also from your smart phone - or you can integrate US Weather Radar in other homepage technologies like Protopage, Netvibes, ...

US Weather Radar at Weather NG

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Control Real Indoor with Webcam Gestures and Cadence Sensor

Real Indoor uses webcam images to allow user gestures to control the Real Indoor user interface and retrieve additional information like the spinning cadence (RPM). While you sit on your spinning bike it is difficult to control the computer e.g. with a mouse and adjust power, cadence, ... - to overcome this we developed the unique gesture control.

This is build leveraging the new HTML5 features of browsers like Chrome which enable to access the video taken by the webcam of your laptop or a connected USB camera. Of course the browser will ask you if you allow access to your webcam so please confirm the question appearing just below the upper browser bar.

Below are some screenshots of the movements detected in the webcam image which then allow identifying the sensor activation and triggering the respective actions. And please remember ... all is done in your browsers javascript engine ;-)

Cadence/RPM detection:




The arrow shows the sensor where RPM calculation is triggered from. When a object (head, shoulder, crank, ...) repeatedly moves into this area the cadence is calculated and influences the power applied and so the driving speed with which the driver is moving forward on the track.

Of course you can drag the RPM sensor to the most suitable position depending if you want to measure your head movements or the rotation of the crank.

Power control:



You can control the slider on the right with the finger or hand the to adjust the power applied.

Heading control:



While driving you might want to look around. When you control the heading slider the Real Indoor driver stops and you can enjoy the beautiful scenery around you.

All controls are optional so you can choose which suits you best while spinning at full power.

User interface:



















Technical background: The webcam images taken via the HTML5 "getUserMedia" javascript API are constantly monitored against changes between the present and the previous image. If movement is detected in the different sensor areas the respective control is triggered.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Add "contrast" to your Real Indoor experience

The new feature of Real Indoor allows to change the contrast of the Streetview images "on the fly". This gives a major enhancement to the spinning experience in Real Indoor.

Many Streetview images have low contrast. Now you can control the contrast of the images in the settings of Real Indoor and tune it to your desired value.

Normal Streetview image from the Col de Tourmalet (Stage 16 of Tour de France 2012):


Contrast enhanced Streetview image from the same location:


This feature works only in Chrome for now and requires to start Chrome with the option "--disable-web-security" - which you should only do for this individual Chrome instance. All other Chrome instances have to be stopped in advance. Because of the reduced security you should not browse other webpages with this setting.

Technical background: the contrast is calculated in the canvas where the Streetview images are loaded into. As the images come from a different site web security settings do not allow access to the image content which is why the web security settings have to be changed to allow the image manipulation.

Saturday, August 04, 2012

Real Indoor: Tour de France 2012 with all stages


The new update of Real Indoor includes all stages from the Tour de France 2012 Race Route in July 2012.

The Tour de France 2012 consists of 20 stages starting with a prologue in Liege/Belgium.

One impression from this years Tour de France in Real Indoor:



If you want to ride one of the Tour de France stages direct your browser to realindoor.com and select "Advanced" when creating a tour. You will find the Tour de France race as first entry in the pull-down:


Saturday, July 14, 2012

US Weather Radar and iGoogle end of life

We are getting several questions about what happens to the US Weather Radar gadget on iGoogle when iGoogle goes end of life in about a year.

We have started a discussion at http://usweatherradar.uservoice.com/ about the migration of the US Weather Radar gadget functionality to a webpage.


The idea is a (small) webpage which can be potentially opened as separate window which has the similar functionality like the iGoogle US Weather Radar (http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=gmapsflighttracker.com/weather/radar/weather-radar.xml).

This way the US Weather Radar could be seen from every browser on desktop as well as on mobile phones.

What do you think? Head over to http://usweatherradar.uservoice.com/ and let us know. We are happy to hear about your ideas!


Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Real Indoor: Paris-Nice 2012 Race Route with all stages

The new update of Real Indoor includes all stages from the Paris-Nice 2012 Race Route in March 2012.

The race consists of 8 stages starting with a time trial near Paris. Further stages cross the country to the south-east into the mountains until decending to the Nice. The last stage is a 9km climb from Nice to the Col d'Èze.

One impression from stage 6 Suze-la-Rousse > Sisteron:




Wednesday, January 25, 2012

More mountain stages from Tour de France

Real Indoor got some more predefined mountain stages from Tour de France 2011 - 2013:
  • Tour de France 2011 Etape 19: From Modane Valfrejus to Alpe-d'Huez 
  • Tour de France 2012 Etape 11: Albertville to La Toussuire
  • Tour de France 2013 Etape 2: Corsica: Bastia to Ajaccio
Climb that hills like the pros ;-)