Discovered a great new tool for paragliding gps log visualization and analysis. Signing in to Doarama took seconds via my Facebook login which I appreciate - I hate tedious signups for free web services.
Doarama creates great animated video in a couple of clicks, from a .igc file. This is the file format which most paragliding XC pilots will download at the end of the day from their gps and upload to Leonardo, XCContest, or the competition organizer if you are competing.
What is really nice about Doorama that it generates a chase viewpoint automatically, even changing direction smoothly to follow your course.
It uses Bing maps rather than google earth. For the Rat Race Sprint tracklogs that I used for my test, the image quality of Woodrat Mountain and the Applegate Valley in Oregon was surpurb. Obviously this is going to depend on the quality of the images where you fly.
In the Woodrat animation, you can see the Mt Shasta 125km away in the background. I found this cool as that is exactly the magical view that I had that day with blue thermals and top of lift at 7500ft!
As a comparison, I put a still image from Doarama next to the similar one from the Google earth trackog for the same flight.
The googleearth view is nice as you can tweak the colour to identify climb rates or speed. But the Doarama animating provides a superior way to analyse your flying style by watching the replay. Google earth will create an animated view, but the automatic scaling of the viewpoint is so smooth and beautiful and the upload process so easy that you can do both very easily.
While Google earth gives more possibilities for analysis of glides, thermals and cross country if you upload the file to Leonardo, there is nothing like watching the Doarama animation to see what the flight was really like. I'll probably add the Doarama anitmation links to my Leonardo flights page in future.
From this Rat Race Sprint tracklog, you can see me charging around about Woodrat mountain waiting for the start window to open - what you can't see at the start is the other 90 pilots in the air at the same time which explains why the tracklog is so choatic.
Then I catch some great thermals over the first turnpoint. You can see clearly my thermalling style - probably best described as fast and loose. However, this was a pumping summer day where after I launched people were being dragged across launch by thermal gusts, and we landed like helicopters in a 25km/h valley flow in 95 degree heat. You couldn't make neat tidy thermals if you tried!
You can also see clearly what the conditions were like as there is barely a moment where the tracklog actually goes in a straight line while on glide. You used as much speedbar as you dared in summer conditions with the wind varying depending on where you were in the valley system. Walls of air, constant wind speed and direction changes and surfing convergence lines was the order of the day. Plus one reserve toss on the final run to goal.
What is noticable is that Doarama uses quite a lot of elevation scaling to make the relief pop out. I had to adjust Google Earth to about 1.5 to match the Doarama feel.
Doarama seems to also add mild shadows, maybe it even adjusts the shadows to the time of day.. The Google Earth shadow effect is way too dramatic in comparison, I leave it turned off.
One interesting feature of Doarama is that if you drag the cursor back in the track, it will automatically zoom from your last position to show the current position from where you zoomed from, which causes the viewpoint to be different.
The software does seem a little flaky - when I embedded the Html in this blog page it wouldn't load the images, but the link worked fine.
In summary Doarama is a fantastic tool for analyzing your flying skills to see how to adjust your style and fly better and more efficently, and I highly recommend you login and try it out!
Doarama creates great animated video in a couple of clicks, from a .igc file. This is the file format which most paragliding XC pilots will download at the end of the day from their gps and upload to Leonardo, XCContest, or the competition organizer if you are competing.
What is really nice about Doorama that it generates a chase viewpoint automatically, even changing direction smoothly to follow your course.
It uses Bing maps rather than google earth. For the Rat Race Sprint tracklogs that I used for my test, the image quality of Woodrat Mountain and the Applegate Valley in Oregon was surpurb. Obviously this is going to depend on the quality of the images where you fly.
In the Woodrat animation, you can see the Mt Shasta 125km away in the background. I found this cool as that is exactly the magical view that I had that day with blue thermals and top of lift at 7500ft!
As a comparison, I put a still image from Doarama next to the similar one from the Google earth trackog for the same flight.
The googleearth view is nice as you can tweak the colour to identify climb rates or speed. But the Doarama animating provides a superior way to analyse your flying style by watching the replay. Google earth will create an animated view, but the automatic scaling of the viewpoint is so smooth and beautiful and the upload process so easy that you can do both very easily.
While Google earth gives more possibilities for analysis of glides, thermals and cross country if you upload the file to Leonardo, there is nothing like watching the Doarama animation to see what the flight was really like. I'll probably add the Doarama anitmation links to my Leonardo flights page in future.
From this Rat Race Sprint tracklog, you can see me charging around about Woodrat mountain waiting for the start window to open - what you can't see at the start is the other 90 pilots in the air at the same time which explains why the tracklog is so choatic.
Then I catch some great thermals over the first turnpoint. You can see clearly my thermalling style - probably best described as fast and loose. However, this was a pumping summer day where after I launched people were being dragged across launch by thermal gusts, and we landed like helicopters in a 25km/h valley flow in 95 degree heat. You couldn't make neat tidy thermals if you tried!
You can also see clearly what the conditions were like as there is barely a moment where the tracklog actually goes in a straight line while on glide. You used as much speedbar as you dared in summer conditions with the wind varying depending on where you were in the valley system. Walls of air, constant wind speed and direction changes and surfing convergence lines was the order of the day. Plus one reserve toss on the final run to goal.
What is noticable is that Doarama uses quite a lot of elevation scaling to make the relief pop out. I had to adjust Google Earth to about 1.5 to match the Doarama feel.
Doarama seems to also add mild shadows, maybe it even adjusts the shadows to the time of day.. The Google Earth shadow effect is way too dramatic in comparison, I leave it turned off.
The software does seem a little flaky - when I embedded the Html in this blog page it wouldn't load the images, but the link worked fine.
In summary Doarama is a fantastic tool for analyzing your flying skills to see how to adjust your style and fly better and more efficently, and I highly recommend you login and try it out!