Saturday, 9 January 2010
VSPARS up and running
If you happen to have spent the whole of 2009 looking around for an affordable yet accurate and lightweight sail and rig vision system, your dreams have now come true. Owen Modral and I have set up our own company called VSPARS. The product is a very hi-tec system using cameras mounted on the deck of a yacht which look up at stripes on the sails and targets on the mast. The software is able to track the movement of these stripes in real time and use them to work out the sail shape and mast deflection, and feed this data back to a display on deck.
"What's the point?", I hear you cry! Well, if the sail trimmers can see what the actual sail shape is on a display, and be able to alter the sail until the shape matches a target optimum shape (you can save sail shapes from when you were going "fast" and load them in as targets) then the boat will go faster. Anyway, for a full description visit the website where there are some nice pictures of the system in action!
"What's the point?", I hear you cry! Well, if the sail trimmers can see what the actual sail shape is on a display, and be able to alter the sail until the shape matches a target optimum shape (you can save sail shapes from when you were going "fast" and load them in as targets) then the boat will go faster. Anyway, for a full description visit the website where there are some nice pictures of the system in action!
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