Simulated fly-overs give bikers a bird’s eye view
By Becky Johnson • Staff Writer
For a cyclist embarking on one of WNC’s epic century rides, studying the elevation profile can be a bit like tracking the sudden rise and fall of the Richter scale during a major quake. It’s enough to make your thighs sore and lungs burn.
The epic rides are plentiful: the Tour de Cashiers, Tour de Tuck, Nantahala Nightmare, Hilly Hillacious Hundred, Hot Doggit, and the list goes on. The rides push cyclists over one gap after another, logging total elevation gains of 10,000 feet or more over 100-mile routes.
If it sounds a bit daunting, there is an easy way out — a very easy way out, in fact. From the comfort of your desk chair, you can take an aerial 3D fly-over of most major bike rides in the region courtsey of Frank Obusek’s Web site, Southern Appalchian Road Climbs. The simulated rides last less than two minutes. As you soar over the landscape, the mountains rise and fall beneath you, lapping up the undulating miles of a particular route.
Obusek, 38, has every major ride in WNC under his tires, from the Assault on Mount Mitchell to the Cherohala Challenge. He’s also a computer geek, driving him to spend months of free time building the Web site: www.mountainmapper.com/cashiers-fr1.htm.
Obusek had a slight advantage when creating the 3D fly-overs. He used to work at the company Erdas that created the software. It is quite the labor-intensive process, however. Starting with a plain map, he builds the rest: drawing in the route, tagging its length with elevation points, and draping it into a 3D environment. It’s still a static map at that point, albeit 3D, but it doesn’t move. So next, he builds a series of sequential maps and puts them together like a digital version of a flipbook.
“You add all those points together and you can create a flight path as if you were an airplane just flying through the air. When it flies through you can record that as a movie,” Obusek said.
The last step is adding background music. The package comes to you in the form of a Windows Media clip.
While the simulated flyovers are the signature of Obusek’s web site, his site catalogs road climbs across the Southern Appalachians. From a regional map sporting highlighted road climbs, you can click on each one to retrieve a topo map of the climb, plus stats like the average grade, the length and elevation gain. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any software to help with that part.
“I actually had to ride and do the climbs myself. I had a computer on my bike that would record this and when I got home I would download the information,” Obusek said.
Obusek should get commission on the travelers he rakes into WNC with his site. Google “road climbs” and Obusek’s site is the second to pop up. Cyclists plan their vacations based on Obusek’s site, while pros coming here to train study the stats of his climbs.
When Obusek first launched the site about three years ago, he shared the link through on-line bike forums. Word quickly circulated.
“Before I knew it people were coming out of the wood works saying ‘I checked out your Web site. It is really cool,’” Obusek said. “I was getting emails from people all over the country who were coming here to ride and had found the web site.”
The Web site has no advertising. It was purely a fun endeavor for Obusek. Once it was up and running, event organizers began asking Obusek to create flyovers of their road rides. For a few favorites, Obusek complied, like the Nantahala Nightmare for NOC or the Hot Doggit out of Hot Springs, but he wouldn’t accept money for it.
“It is a combination between by professional background and my personal interest,” Obusek said.
By day, Obusek is a geospatial image specialist for the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources in Asheville. He can take satellite images of a lake, measure the light reflecting off the water and turn it into a map of sediment sources. He can take aerial photography of town and calculate the percentage of impervious surfaces.
For those who are into that kind of thing, Obusek even has a geospatial imaging blog — geospatialimaging.blogspot.com. In one post he calls on fellow geospatial imagers to “Get out your red-blue stereo anaglyph glasses.” In another, he delves into the ins and outs of orthorectification. Last Christmas, he posted an aerial shot of his office building with a big red bow superimposed on the roof.
Obusek has a personal blog as well — fobusek.blogspot.com. A travelogue of a trip out West includes a map with points of interest he visited for those who want to follow his itinerary, including the best local coffee shops.
------o^o------Link to the Smoky Mountain News and the article.
No comments:
Post a Comment