Techtopia Gym Surveillance Technology is Here. Plus Inclusivity!

https://www.climbingbusinessjournal.com/techtopia-releases-its-ai-assisted-alarm-system-for-climbing-gyms

"Actually, the present is digital, and the future is digitally enhanced reality. In the world of climbing and gym management, this means that data can help gym managers and staff members optimize their work immensely. How so? Higher Eye AI devices are connected to a server and collect multiple data points. How this data is used is all in the hands of the gym owners.

First and foremost, routesetting could be tracked and implemented more precisely because the Higher Eye AI generates a heat map of the wall with statistics for the routes, so gym owners can see which ones are preferred by climbers. These might be known to longtime gym staffers, but could be extremely useful when onboarding new gym supervisors so they know the walls and the routes quite well from day one.

Higher Eye data also provides detailed information about each route’s average time to climb, where the climbers drop most often, which areas climbers are spending more time at, etc."

And much more.

... and they call it climbing!

...where the climbers drop most often...,

Are we not calling if "falling" anymore?

I wonder if it will notify someone if your belayer isn’t displaying their belay card?

good lord.

The only reason this is worth paying attention to is as yet another reminder of the tech industry's obsession with collecting and monetizing every last scrap of data on how you live your life... and figuring out how it adds value to the customer (the gym in this case) as the LAST step.

Whoever wrote that copy clearly has no idea how frequently routes are reset.

Peter Beal wrote:

https://www.climbingbusinessjournal.com/techtopia-releases-its-ai-assisted-alarm-system-for-climbing-gyms

"Actually, the present is digital, and the future is digitally enhanced reality. In the world of climbing and gym management, this means that data can help gym managers and staff members optimize their work immensely. How so? Higher Eye AI devices are connected to a server and collect multiple data points. How this data is used is all in the hands of the gym owners.

First and foremost, routesetting could be tracked and implemented more precisely because the Higher Eye AI generates a heat map of the wall with statistics for the routes, so gym owners can see which ones are preferred by climbers. These might be known to longtime gym staffers, but could be extremely useful when onboarding new gym supervisors so they know the walls and the routes quite well from day one.

Higher Eye data also provides detailed information about each route’s average time to climb, where the climbers drop most often, which areas climbers are spending more time at, etc."

And much more.

More useless “data”.

I won't be going to gyms that implement this.

But I know how that works: because they aren't measuring how many people this loses, they don't care.

No matter how brightly colored the gates are, or how bold the messages on the triangles are, there are always people who forget to attach themselves to the auto belay. We are happy that nowadays climbing is more accessible and popular than ever, rather than being an exclusive club for only the most experienced and enlightened. -quote from article

Wait, what? 

So, we put cameras everywhere to make sure people who don’t stop and attach themselves to an auto belay are satisfied in their inclusion to an “exclusive” club of those who choose to use their brains? How experienced do you have to be to not know how an auto belay works? How enlightened do you have to be? Gandhi, Budda, Jerry Garcia? I mean come on. 

I wonder if this will be as annoying and intrusive as the AI logic at the grocery that constantly accuses me of not putting my item in the shopping bag and queries the attendant to inspect and rule out my "theft" attempts? The alarms and lasers will certainly add excitement to the already chaotic environment that is date night and daycare center masquerading as climbing gym. What an exciting time to be alive!!!

Fuck big data

I simply do not understand how all of you have been duped. When stuff like this comes out the technology is often so incomplete that it doesn’t work at all yet, and it’s mostly a tool used for brand building. That’s all this piece is.

First the actual technology probably does exist however it’s probably so buggy it cannot function. The dataset would need to have significant manual coding since actual accidents are so rare you would need someone to spend a ton of time finding actual examples, for hours and hours and hours. This probably won’t be used for 10 years.

What I’m sure walltopia is going to do is offer this ai service at an absolute insane fee. Then offer gym owners the basic model, which actually will just be good cameras and maybe weight triggered scales.

Also reading the actual description you will know if your gym uses this service since there will be a 360 camera. If your gym gets this service they probably been watching you on cameras this whole time.

But f*** walltopia either way.

We are simply feeble minded and rely on you, Princess, to reorient us. Thank you for bringing us all back down to earth; it is with your guidance that tonight is a night I won't hit the bottle to fall asleep. God bless!

Mike D wrote:

I'm not so sure about that, considering you can train a model to recognize pictures as "A" or "not A" using a small dataset by just rotating/scaling the pictures, feeding them in again and repeating this a bunch of times. Same with deepfakes of long-dead, non-famous people that were trained on just a handful of photographs by transforming them over and over. I'm sure Walltopia can just hire some people to free solo above the auto belays for a few hours and train the software until it's "good enough." I'm sorry if you knew this already. I'm not an expert on this subject, but not completely ignorant either. I hope you're right that this takes a long time to materialize and ends up being a watered-down version of the thing described in the article.

I'm going to ask how to get in touch with the owner of my gym the next time I'm in there. Ask if this is in the works and if so let them know that I'll have to cancel my membership because of it. What else can I do?

This is actually a decent idea and could be implemented.

In general terms of cameras we are all on camera far more than any of us could ever imagine. Some willfully...most...not.

Mike D wrote:

I'm going to ask how to get in touch with the owner of my gym the next time I'm in there. Ask if this is in the works and if so let them know that I'll have to cancel my membership because of it. What else can I do?

I would like to clarify something - you would cancel membership if your gym installed AI-assisted video system to monitor that people climbing on autobelays do not forget to clip in.

I would imagine that this comes with a very hefty price tag, and probably wouldn’t become “standard” anytime soon, if it catches on at all.

I am very doubtful of the “inclusivity” claim, and doubtful that it would make a meaningful difference for safety. The  usefulness of “data” collected this way is also kinda doubtful—they concede that any gym floor employee would easily know which routes are most popular, which ones have a stopper crux for a bunch of people, etc.  

But people freaking out about “surveillance” are hilarious! Didn’t you read your gym waiver, that says you could be photographed or videotaped while in the gym? Did you refuse to sign it? Do you refuse to use Googlemaps, Bc they display real-time traffic data, based on data they get from peoples phones? 

Climber safety is just a front.  We all know the real outcome of this technology is to catch the people who wear their climbing shoes into the bathroom. 

Aaron Clifton wrote:

No matter how brightly colored the gates are, or how bold the messages on the triangles are, there are always people who forget to attach themselves to the auto belay. We are happy that nowadays climbing is more accessible and popular than ever, rather than being an exclusive club for only the most experienced and enlightened. -quote from article

Wait, what? 

So, we put cameras everywhere to make sure people who don’t stop and attach themselves to an auto belay are satisfied in their inclusion to an “exclusive” club of those who choose to use their brains? How experienced do you have to be to not know how an auto belay works? How enlightened do you have to be? Gandhi, Budda, Jerry Garcia? I mean come on. 

There was a thread sometime in the past 2-ish years about forgetting to clip in to an autobelay. What was shocking was the number of relatively experienced MP climbers who admitted to doing this. In some cases enough times for it to be a chronic problem.

Mike D wrote:

I'm not so sure about that, considering you can train a model to recognize pictures as "A" or "not A" using a small dataset by just rotating/scaling the pictures, feeding them in again and repeating this a bunch of times. Same with deepfakes of long-dead, non-famous people that were trained on just a handful of photographs by transforming them over and over. I'm sure Walltopia can just hire some people to free solo above the auto belays for a few hours and train the software until it's "good enough." I'm sorry if you knew this already. I'm not an expert on this subject, but not completely ignorant either. I hope you're right that this takes a long time to materialize and ends up being a watered-down version of the thing described in the article.

I'm going to ask how to get in touch with the owner of my gym the next time I'm in there. Ask if this is in the works and if so let them know that I'll have to cancel my membership because of it. What else can I do?

I was thinking the article was implying that it was a comprehensive safety thing long term not just auto belays. However, for the specific application of the auto belay, the issue in my mind would be all the adjacent stuff. People standing infront of the camera, people on adjacent routes, people just standing under the auto belay, routes being reset, kids running through the gym. Also I don't know how it would check you are clipped in correctly unless you were required to turn around or that you didn't somehow mess with the autobelay station. Then there is the more unclear stuff, what does it do if you attach to the device out of sequence, or if someone decides they wanna lead the route, what happens when the auto belay is moved, what happens if someone tries to climb a route way left or right, what if the old man traversing the gym goes past the auto belay? 

I just think this is a puff piece and people wanna circle jerk to the idea that the gym is bad because they could have surveillance on you. Like Lena said, I think in practice none of you took a stand against being watched in your waiver, so are you actually gonna do anything when it comes to a gym?

CF Burnstein wrote:

I wonder if this will be as annoying and intrusive as the AI logic at the grocery that constantly accuses me of not putting my item in the shopping bag and queries the attendant to inspect and rule out my "theft" attempts? 

That tech isn't remotely AI based by any stretch of the imagination.

For the folks clutching their pearls over "surveillance" - how many of you always have your phone pocket computer with you, always powered up? Did you turn off location tracking? What apps did you allow access to location data? Are you checking which cookies you allow on every web site you visit? Are you maintaining an up to date tick list on MP? And you're not going to go to a gym that has this tech? Give me an effing break.