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Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

climbing.ai

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Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#41

Post by latchkey »

Of course everyone on HN is focused on the climbing / beta / technique aspect of this.

It is ok that it is a solution looking for a problem. There is obviously no 'business' or 'product' here. It isn't like there is a payment link on the page or anything.

What I'd like to see the comments focus on is that we should just be happy that someone is making the effort to learn more about AI and building tooling around it. Experimentation is king.

They've put their work out into the open (soon to be open sourced even!), not to be criticized over whether it is useful or not, but just that they created something that could spawn other interesting things that solve real world use cases.

Huge kudos for doing this work.

Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#42

Post by party_possum »

Climbing route setting (when done at a high level) is constantly in conversation with itself. Many climbers don't realize that there are trends or fads in movement styles that sweep across the industry. This has only picked up steam in an era of social media.

Just like movie dorks will happily spend hours explaining how an individual shot in a movie is actually an insider reference to another movie, and as a result a statement of intent for the movie as a whole, professional route setters will talk your ear off about the way one of their problems embraces or rejects specific kinds of movement trends of the last 6 months.

That intentional rejection is interesting. Many route setters, especially for competitions, are in constant search of novelty. One kind of perfect problem is something that looks confusing and impossible, up until you see it done, at which point it seems almost obvious. It's the feeling of solving a sudoku. But critically, they want climbers to be initially confused.

I wonder if AI might actually be better than humans at sequencing these kinds of problems. Humans bring so much context and experience and expectation to the process that we are easily tricked. AI just looks through a few terabytes of video and says "What about this?".

Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#43

Post by et-al »

takk309 wrote: post #38

Could this be used to grade routes? It would be cool if a photo or short video of a route could be used to better assist in grading climbing routes. Grading is a massively subjective thing, to some extent, so this could be super tricky.

I only watched the video, but without taking in account the texture of the holds, the grading aspect would be limited.

One also learns to just recalibrate according to regions. E.g. climbing 11d at one gym, versus 12a at another.

Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#44

Post by Zanfa »

logtempo wrote: post #21
prions wrote: post #11

It looks really interesting, but as an experienced climber I'm not sure if just watching a video of my avatar climbing would really help with skill acquisition. Also, this claims that the wall type or video quality doesn't matter, but I have a hard time understanding how the model would be able to understand that a small crimp could possibly be dual textured and therefore has only a few specific ways of approaching i…

I don't see the shape of the holds being a big problem. With some help from indoor companies and hold makers, figuring out which hold model is on the wall should be possible. As for the usefullness of the software, I'm sceptical too as it don't really solve a problem. But maybe I'm not seeing it and it could be good for beginners :) A good improvement would be adding a comparison between you and the model in term of…

> I don't see the shape of the holds being a big problem. With some help from indoor companies and hold makers, figuring out which hold model is on the wall should be possible.

Even if you know the exact hold model and it’s in pristine condition, it’s basically impossible to tell how it’s gonna work from a single angle on video at a distance. Even tiny variations in angle of the wall and rotation of the hold on the wall can completely change how you use it.

Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#45

Post by ethbr1 »

smandava wrote: post #5

Note: Will attach more example outputs and make a detailed document about how the model was built and the research behind it. If this is interesting to you, feel free to sign up to the waitlist on www.climbing.ai (and make sure to sign up for our Discord!) I originally planned on open sourcing the model, data, weights, and code. Only a few people (me and a couple friends) have access to the hosted model on the web ap…

High-level details about how you tackled the various sub-problems would be useful.

I assume, at minimum, there's:

   - Segmentation of moving elements
   - 3d reconstruction from 2d video
   - Reverse kinematics
   - Identification of holds
   - Search for potential climbing path
   - Generation of kinematics for path

Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#46

Post by i_am_a_squirrel »

If anyone would actually use this (I don't think they would, because the puzzle, and talking about beta is half the fun of climbing)...

...then this would be very valuable data.

Eventually you could train AI to generate routes, and then you could fire all of your master setters!

Climb setters should unionize and copyright their art before it's too late (like for painters and software developers and musicians)

Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#47

Post by ethbr1 »

alexcp_ wrote: post #40
party_possum wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of incorporating actual hold data and "recognizing" specific holds is interesting, but I'm not sure it completely solves the problem. The "Boss" from Pusher is arguably the most famous climbing hold ever made. For a decade or more, every gym had one, but they were all unique. Lots of them had micro chips that became critical to usage of the hold. Some had decent texture and some were glassy smooth from years…

Exactly, holds will evolve as they get used and more polished, even indoors. Climbing a Moonboard with a new set of holds is quite different than climbing on one with older more polished holds, even if it's the exact same problem and the same holds. It's an interesting project and it could be fun to watch, but it's completely useless.

Couldn't you reverse-reason about that?

To me, the customer here would be climbing gyms, offering a service to climbers.

   1. Set up camera on routes
   2. Record all climbs
   3. Reason through hold details
   4. Generate potential movements
   5. Show climbs vs ghost movements
   6. Feedback to tune model
3 being accomplished by reasoning "if a movement should be possible using the identified hold, but no one successfully does it, the hold must be misidentified or have different properties."

Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#48

Post by hirako2000 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #45
smandava wrote: post #5

Note: Will attach more example outputs and make a detailed document about how the model was built and the research behind it. If this is interesting to you, feel free to sign up to the waitlist on www.climbing.ai (and make sure to sign up for our Discord!) I originally planned on open sourcing the model, data, weights, and code. Only a few people (me and a couple friends) have access to the hosted model on the web ap…

High-level details about how you tackled the various sub-problems would be useful. I assume, at minimum, there's: - Segmentation of moving elements - 3d reconstruction from 2d video - Reverse kinematics - Identification of holds - Search for potential climbing path - Generation of kinematics for path

Likely looking to see a 100k emails list before really thinking about all these problems to solve and well.

Worst case able to build this, scenario, author builds something else entirely.

Re: Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body

#50

Post by ethbr1 »

goodmattg wrote: post #10

A few thoughts as I've done academic research & built products in this area: - if you're using SMPL body parameters this will have to stay research / open-source - is this leveraging some sort of monocular depth estimation to estimate the wall in 3D space? Also, do you have assumed camera parameters, or is that also estimated? If there isn't any depth information, this will be highly inaccurate on any cliff routes, b…

> the tricky part that I'm impressed you have a solution to is path planning up the wall.

I'm assuming this is evolutionary / brute force of some nature, given OP's comments about it being expensive to run.

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