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Developing Mountain Biking in Scotland has launched scottishmountainbiketrails.com, a Bing-based mapping project which brings Scottish MTB trail-centres to digital life. The project was officially launched today at the Scottish Mountain Bike Conference being staged in Aviemore.
The data for the website has taken two years to collect. The scrollable zoomable map also featues headcam videos of all the trails – the headcam video for Glenress lasts for 65 minutes.
The 3D terrain animation invites users to browse trails they have never been to before and with the camera controls, they can roam the 3D terrain as the videos play to enhance the visual experience of the trails in Scotland. Video overlays also provide elevation and grading guidance.
Graeme McLean, project manager of DMBinS (seen above at the conference), said: “This project is an innovative and pioneering project using cutting-edge technology – Scotland is the first country in the world to visually display all trail centres on virtual mapping software."
The website and data collection was funded through the Commonwealth Graduate Fund which enabled DMBinS to employ Eilidh Wells, a geomatics graduate of University of Glasgow. Wells had approached DMBinS with the results of her Masters project where she examined the accuracy of mobile GPS data collection methods.
Wells said: “I studied geomatics at university – it’s geographic data collection and processing – and as a keen mountain biker I was able to combine my studies with the discipline for an MSc project.
"Off the back of the university project I had an idea to further my skills by researching how to display data. Still fairly new to mountain biking, I felt there was a great source of information dotted about the internet but there was no simple map containing all the purpose built trails to bring this information together."
