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SurfSens Brings Surfing Into the Computer Age
cylonlover writes "In an activity that for many of its participants is akin to a religion, the merging of surfing and technology might seem a bit like blasphemy. But while surfing is still about lifestyle for many of us, these days it's also a competitive sport offering huge amounts of prize money, so it's no surprise to see the emergence of boards packing more than just polyurethane within their fiberglass shells. With the aim of 'turning feelings into facts and figures,' research company Tecnalia and Spanish surfboard manufacturer Pukas have teamed up to create a surfboard that packs a gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS compass, pressure sensors and strain gauges to measure the flex of the board."
No need for skill anymore. Slap some speakers on it and call it Surf Hero.
I'm quite genuinely surprised that this has not been done sooner.
In hindsight, it seems quite an obvious thing to do.
As an Amish gentleman, I find this product quite wicked, and I shall not purchase one.
Yeah, right. Take one of these foo-foo boards out and get the **** beaten out of you by "locals only" townies. These rednecks then take your board, break it in half, and sell the parts to a chop shop. (Do they even have chop shops for surfboards? Well they'll have to start now!)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Yo dawg, we heard you like surfing so we put a computer in yo' surfboard so you can surf while you surf.
It wasn't until the end of the summary I realized it was referring to something else than web-surfing. Duh.
Tag this as tubular, dude!
A pity they left out the most useful feature.
Recently surfboard flex and return speed have bean at the forefront of board design. Unfortunately there are two very big problems with trying to design a board that has perfect flex. One is that surfers descriptions are flawed. A surfer might say a board feels stiff when the board is actually very flexible. The stiff feeling comes from the board having a fast return speed from flex. The second problem is that a board that has the best new flex design could get bad reviews because it is not what people are used to. With the computerized surfboard it will be possible to get to the bottom of these kinds of subtleties. This really could revolutionize surf board design.
I would love to hear what any of the Computational Fluid Dynamics folks might have to say about all of this.
Huh. :P
It took me till about half-way through the above before I realized they were talking about the water + wave kind of surfing, little directly to do with the internet. Obviously, I was quite confused.
My keyboard IS my surfboard brah!
Android Standard Hardware has all of that except for the strain gauges.
Install strain gauges/bluetooth module in to the board & carve space for a waterproof android dock out of the foam.
It would be cool to see a shark chomping through the board and spitting out the indigestible bits
.
Talking of high tech, whatever happened to the thing I saw about 5-6 years ago where someone had fitted a small hydrofoil blade beneath the rear of the board, which lifted the whole thing out of the water at speed and made it ultra-fast and ultra-manouverable. I know little about surfing, so maybe that wasn't playing fair, and it got seen off by the surfing equivalent of the "get off my lawn"brigade, but it seemed a great idea and once seen, sort of obvious. Not even expensive to make.
than what Intel cooked up back in the mid-2K's. A board with a PC and wireless connectivity. Almost as bad as branding with Disney.
What, no media player? No digital camera? No Shark Shield?
With all of the possibilities, they seem to have chosen the lamest ones.
A GPS? Seriously? "Dude, this surf is awesome....where the hell am I?" I still remember where I was the last time I surfed - 14th Street, Del Mar - a short climb down the cliff to the isolated beach.
"Lame" - Galaxar