Costyn

I've created an event on Facebook and invited a bunch of people, to inform those that don't read dz.com regularly... http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=64701780900 You can put yourself on the guest list there if you want... Also, if you're interested, but don't have any team mates yet, let us know in this thread, and we can maybe match you up with other people looking for teammates. Cheers Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Looking good... how much will they be? Cheers Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Sounds pretty damn cool... you guys are lucky with all your awesome jumpable weather pretty all year long. Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Hmm come to think of it I was able to them somewhat easily too, Alex and Jarno had a harder time. But I really wonder if its going to be possible to fly a formation that way, with one person docked on each leg. Wait, how is that different from Jeff's current grid? It still suffers from Yuri scattering doesn't it? What are the criteria for the formation being complete and not complete? Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

I agree. I think since we are gliders, we should try to make formations which look like those made by airplanes. They can't/don't dock, so why should we.

Yea, Jarno and I find that suits where the attachment point of the wing is below the knee are kind of twitchy and harder to control than those with attachment points above the knee. Like you said, when you give input with your legs, you do something with your arm wings and vice versa. Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Yes, I'm replying to myself... again... Here's James' thread with bigway pictures: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3401101. Matt mentions another thread, which I can't find at the moment as search is broken. Maybe we can try this new criteria on these pictures? Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Well, here's the entire formation. It's pretty hard to get the best fit... I can imagine it was driving the organization nuts trying to place a grid over 10,000 different pictures. I have done a bunch of sheering and changing angular distortion, but this is the best I can come up with (the diamonds seem to cover the most people). Too bad we don't have a picture without the existing grid in it... anyone? If anyone wants the OmniGraffle or Visio document to play with, you can download them here (they're too big to put as attachment here). I have no idea if the Visio document works - I made it in OmniGraffle and exported to Visio... Cheers Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

I've put your diamond-in-diamonds idea into pictures, using the base pic with 2 different size diamonds. I had to rotate the picture but I wasn't able to draw horizontal/vertical lines between the points of each grid diamond. There is some weird crooking going on within the diamond grid. I guess we can make the red diamonds bigger and smaller to make it easier or harder. How big should we make them? Note I've added a 3rd picture, where I keep a grid spacing but moved the diamonds around and did some skewing and put the base diamond over Jeff. The result is quite nice actually. I'll see if I can get some more jumpers in, see where people start to "fall out" of the formation. Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Okay I agree, the pressurized.at movie looks like he's flying a prototype which doesn't have a very smooth look to it. And yes, the V3 would probably do better. I'd love to see more video of wool threads on wingsuits. Tony told me he did a couple jumps with them as well, and he also saw the flow quickly became turbulent, the threads pointing forward instead of back. It would be cool if he could post some video if he has any. Tony? Also, for this project it might be useful to get some GPS data from someone who does wingsuit BASE, max flight for 30 seconds, to get some good l/d data. It seems that people like Loic and Robi really do get a pretty good l/d, looking at the smoke trail they leave behind. Cheers Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Hi, Thanks for your interest. Please don't be too disheartened by Johan's post. He means well and doesn't want to scare you away, even though it may seem that way.

First of all, happy new year to eveyone. Hope it brings lots of fun flocks and jumps to all! It sounds like really cool software. Too bad it's so expensive, but hey I guess thats why its industrial software. Hmmm I quite like this idea, but with this diamond-in-diamond method, we do allow for homogenous deviations? Seeing your examples (nice work btw), I think we should disallow crooking. We just want straight lines. Cheers! Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Ah, okay yea. Agreed. Lets find out what skewing and crooking do for the numbers. Maybe it will sort itself out, and otherwise we need to adapt. Agreed. Lets start with good pictures of formations and see what kind of numbers we come up with. Later we can work with compensating for the more difficult pictures; or maybe we don't want to do this at all. Yes, some examples might be good. I'm not clear on the angular distortion? What kind of distortion is that? Yes, it would be nice, but except for a couple formations that have been done like Top Gun's, the Lodi 16-ways etc where it was really obvious, we really do need a way to judge and compare formations. That's going to be very hard or impossible. Like I wrote in another thread, leaving more room between wingsuiters in a formation will make the formation with a lot less movement. Put everything tight together (but not yet docked), and you get some insane waves going. Or maybe we're just too eager. Maybe we need to wait with flying large flocks until we can fly small no-contact ones where everybody is within a foot of eachother... But big ones are fun, damnit... Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Agreed. We should let it stretch uniformly. Well I'm thinking since all wingsuiters have a pretty similar shape, maybe it'll be possible to automate this too, with some image pattern matching. But, lets first get an application that'll calculate all the values from manually moving the dots on the heads of people. The calculations aren't that hard, and besides your average laptop computer has a ridiculous amount of computing power anyways. I do not think this will be a problem. Image pattern matching for automated picking out of heads might be computanionally intensive, I don't really know about that actually. But my distances between heads method does away with the grid right? I mean why bother with diamonds, rectangles or squares any more? Hmm interesting point... again, we'll have to see what it does for the numbers once we have the app. I'm thinking that if the front diagonal is bent, the rms of the horizontal lines will be higher as everyone will be flying closer together, so that should work out, right? About splitting the diagonals you mentioned in an earlier post... you're right, if the photographer goes ahead and to the left of the formation, you get distortion there. I think we should be able to compensate for that though. We can even include an extra dot in the application which represents the approximate location of the photographer above the formation, so we can compensate. Cheers Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

The wing is quite a mess compared to the base, so we'd expect the values to be a lot higher. In my book, the whole formation should look like the base, so no, the wing didn't get it. The left wing was problematic throughout the event for unknown reasons. I thought the exact same thing, and I've been doing some googling today, looking for a Java app that allows you to place points (nodes) connect them with lines (edges) and move the points around, I've only found some libraries so far. I'd code it up myself, but don't want to re-invent the wheel, and my Java skills are quite rusty unfortunately. If anyone else finds anything, please post it here! Also, any Java programmers around? Here's looking at you, Vidiot/Klaus.

Well, it's actually really hard to construct, but after you have a model in a computer, judging becomes a breeze. Since we only have 2D data, we can't really take into account the z-axis until we have the 3d reconstruction. My vision is that eventually we'll have a program you can run on your laptop, tell it the formation you are trying to build, feed it some pictures, and it'll tell you if any of the pictures qualify. That picture can then be further evaluated by officials like Guiness or FAI (gosh, those are scary words to use around here these days.

Why do you think they won't work? At the moment, using the grid method, it does count. Eventually I'm hoping there will be a method to reconstruct the position of every skydiver in the sky in a 3d model, as described here. From the 3d model you can now use the z-axis in the calculations. This paper is about reconstructing a static scene, but it's also from 2003. I haven't really looked yet for newer papers, but I hope there are people working on this. It's quite an essential subject for computer/robot vision. There are lots of hits on Google anyways... But lets work out the 2D stuff first, it's hard enough as it is. What do you mean by artistic nuances? Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Well, procrastinating at work actually... But yea when it's below freezing at ground level, it's not worth the effort any more. Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Okay so you have a point. I guess we can only find out by trying. Where are we going to find foam noodles? Edit: I have some pics with line lenghts. Blue lines are supposed to be horizontal and black lines diagonal. I'm guesstimating the average length for the black lines is about 1.8 or 1.9 and the blue lines about 1.4 or 1.5. Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

I've quickly made 2 examples of what I mean. In the first picture (Pic 17), the average deviation of the line lengths is quite low, the formation looks good. In the second picture (Pic 19), the average deviation is quite high. Of course, these examples are from 1 picture, which raises the question, if everybody is in their exact slot except for 1 person, the average deviation is still within limts, but the formation is not complete.... what do we do then? Or do we define a max deviation for an individual which is still acceptable? Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

I would actually really like to hear him explain in layman's terms what this means and just how easy this is. Calling John Kallend! When I first read his post I thought he was joking, but reading it again I think I know what he means: figure out how far each wingsuiter was from his intended place in the formation and if the average deviation is less than 2 meters then the formation is considered complete. I quite like it, although we'd have to play with the deviation value and see what works and then finally agree on what defines complete is and what not. Another problem I see with this is that the judging becomes quite difficult, it is subject to human error, as you'd have to place each dot on the jumper in the picture, the location of which is open to interpretation (do you place it on the head or on the body etc etc). I've been working on some ideas on automated judging by computer. If you have 100 pics per photographer per jump, and 4 photographers, you have 400 pics per jump to go through, which is what the Elsinore organizers pretty much said happened. I propose to have a computer vision algorithm to look through the pictures, figure out where each jumper is, which is quite hard, seeing as even I have trouble differentiating the wingsuiters from the backgrond in some pictures. Then apply the judging algorithm and see which picture is the best. If there's anyone out there with programming and/or computer science skills that'd like to see if we can work something out, send me a PM. In reply to the rest of your lengthy post, I have to say I agree with most of your ideas, although I think the foam noodles are probably not going to work. They're going to be flapping around quite a bit, and catching and holding on to them is going to be a challenge. They would need to stretch a bit too, to allow for movement. One person falling out and holding too long onto the noodle could take out the entire formation...

Okay, I didn't know this... I still would've liked him taking stills and video below the formation.

No. Not here in Euroland. At least, I'm not subscribed... Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

Okay yea so the grid thing didn't work out so well, it was still an epic formation and a lot of fun to participate. Thanks for posting this Jeff, can we get a pic without the grid please? And next year, pretty please with sugar on top put Mark flying on his back underneath the formation to take stills and video. I (and others) really missed the views from below during the event. All the pictures from above are quite difficult to make out against the background. Cheers, Costyn. Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News

So... where is it? Missing attachment? Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News