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

climbing.ai

121–130 of 149 posts

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

#121
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trad lead is climbing. Basically everything else is some sort of simulation.

It's 2024 and some people are gonna gatekeep that if you're not shoving cams in some bigwall granite, it's not climbing?

Cams? Real climbers use stones wrapped with hawser!

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

#122
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…

[deleted]

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

#123
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trad lead is climbing. Basically everything else is some sort of simulation.

It's 2024 and some people are gonna gatekeep that if you're not shoving cams in some bigwall granite, it's not climbing?

This one-upmanship is very much part of climbing culture. From the top down, the hierarchy is: free soloists (climbing at height without any protection), trad climbers (carry the rope up with them, set their own protection), sports lead climbers (carry the rope up with them, bolts are set into the wall), top rope climbers (rope already there dangling from the top). Right down the bottom, you have aid climbing, when you use equipment to haul yourself up on a rope.

And then there's indoors vs. outdoors, with some dedicated outdoor climbers regarding anything done in a climbing gym as "not real climbing".

Most people don't take this literally, and it's generally considered to be a standing joke in climbing. Sadly, though, some people take it very seriously.

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

#124
post #110

I feel like I’m the right audience for this - a not very good climber with unusual distribution of limbs. But I’m not interested - part of the fun in climbing is on sight climbs and solving problems yourself.

Man, where is the hacking spirit? OP posts a very cool, impressive hack and all everyone can talk about in the comments is how it actually isn't interesting to them.

It's great if someone wants to use the "hacking spirit" to help themself climb, it doesn't obligate everyone else to want to use the same technique; and frankly it's (slightly) more interesting hearing people say why they would or wouldn't use it than to have a bunch of comments just saying "awesome that you're doing this" and ignoring whether they'd find it interesting themselves or not.

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

#125
post #124
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, where is the hacking spirit? OP posts a very cool, impressive hack and all everyone can talk about in the comments is how it actually isn't interesting to them.

It's great if someone wants to use the "hacking spirit" to help themself climb, it doesn't obligate everyone else to want to use the same technique; and frankly it's (slightly) more interesting hearing people say why they would or wouldn't use it than to have a bunch of comments just saying "awesome that you're doing this" and ignoring whether they'd find it interesting themselves or not.

I would say (opinion) that it’s vastly more interesting to hear whether other people would use Thing I Built. I can nerd snipe myself all day on projects. By that I mean I can easily endlessly entertain myself building things, both useless and useful. Whether they are interesting AND useful for other people is quite a large driver for me both for personal and business projects

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

#126
Very nice. Please do open it up as much as possible. I'm curious about the data pipeline. I love bouldering and have thought about different ML ideas in that domain. I'm also an avid beta breaker. Finding alternative solutions somehow tickles my hacker-brain. So my first idea was intended beta vs. alternatives but I was only thinking in 2d and images :) Another idea I've played around with is more objective grading but labeling is kind of hard especially with gyms rotating routes so I thought about using Kilterboatd data and transfer learning it or maybe unsupervised approaches.

Congrats on a cool idea and most importantly the execution.

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

#127
post #59
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 suspect that, absent that information about the exact right way to grab a hold, or the exact way to put a foot on a hold, you'll be limited to beta suggestions , which is fine, I think. It'd be like having a group of other climbers nearby to suggest different beta, even if you don't have any friends. So, in terms of solving complicated beta faster, I see real utility to this. It is very interesting that since the A…

(Long time climber here)

> It is very interesting that since the AI climber is trained on actual climbers, it could, in principle, provide beta to climb consistent with your own style. If you train the bot exclusively on footage of yourself, it would return movement based on your style. If your style is finessy-all-backstep-all-the-time (aka The Edlinger), it can provide beta consistent with that. If your style is to square up and pull (otherwise known as The American), it can provide beta consistent with that instead.

I would think this is actually a Bad Thing. It's very easy to get stuck trying to make a sequence fit your style of climbing. The better approach (especially for long term skill acquisition) is a willingness to learn new styles. That's to say that every sequence is only solvable via one particular style, but I think long term development is hindered if you approach every crux with the one thing you are good at.

> So, in terms of solving complicated beta faster, I see real utility to this.

I can agree with this. But, to the point that others have made, I do wonder what this and the availability of beta videos for many, many routes and blocs does to climbing skill overall. Perhaps I'm just a grumpy old man, but, particularly when bouldering, sorting out the beta should be part of the journey toward eventually sending. Last fall, I visited Hueco Tanks after a six year absence. I suppose I was a bit disappointed to see so many people watching YouTube beta videos of nearly every problem they tried.

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

#129
Cool project but please delete it. You’re taking the fun part out from bouldering and just leaving us the labour ;)

Edit: apprently I wasnt the first to make this joke. I emphasise that this is Really a cool project. Great job!

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

#130
post #77

The AI analysed my body and said coldly, "Just take the elevator."

Here is an interesting post about how body mass affects climbing ability.

Even if you have a great BMI and muscular build, but if you are heavy, then at some point physics starts working against you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bouldering/comments/595a2m/how_much...

> The basic physics of strength/weight is that strength is reliant on the cross sectional area of muscles (number of fibers) and therefore increases quadratically, whereas weight is a function of volume and increases cubically. So the amount of strength you can gain as your mass increases will always lag behind the amount of mass gained. This is why insects are so strong compared to their bodyweight, and why the creatures with the highest strength/weight ratio's are all small.

> If we analzye male pro climbers we'll see that the heaviest of them max out at around 170-180 lbs (and there are VERY few of those, the majority being between 130 and 150), and that's not a fluke. In order to be a great rock climber you need strong forearms, and strong lats, and that's about it. Muscle mass, or fat mass basically anywhere else is mostly just pulling you off the wall (a strong core helps too but it doesn't need to weigh a lot).

> (...)

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