Live From the 37th America's Cup: How This Year's Coverage Found the Holy Grail of Seeing the Wind'

Live From the 37th America's Cup: How This Year's Coverage Found the Holy Grail of Seeing the Wind' LiDAR sensors on shore measure wind speed by tracking speed of dust and particles By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Friday, October 18, 2024 - 11:02 am

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The 37th America's Cup, being held in Barcelona, has managed to do what was previously impossible and is making the invisible visible via the launch of WindSight IQ from Capgemini. The system uses LiDAR sensors to measure the wind in real time and fuses multiple sensor streams using innovative algorithms to enable a wind field to be created over the entire racecourse.

For viewers at home, the blue graphical areas on the screen represent the areas where winds can provide an advantage, making it easier to understand the optimal place for the yachts to sail (worth noting: crews on the yachts are completely on their own, relying on good old-fashioned intuition and instincts).

For the first time ever, America's Cup viewers can see wind conditions as Capgemini's LiDAR system tracks the speed of dust and air particles across the entire course in 10- x 10-meter areas.

Finding a way to visualize wind has always been the holy grail in broadcast coverage of sailing events. Doppler LiDAR systems have been available in industry for 25 years, notes Brent Russell, head of technology, America's Cup Media. While this concept for sailing has been sleeping for at least a decade, it has been able to germinate now because the defenders had a strong will to deliver our innovation goals for this Cup.

Capgemini and America's Cup Media combined expertise in technology, engineering, data, and design to reveal the wind in augmented-reality (AR) and virtual-reality (VR) graphics. The wind-field data is fed in real time to a yacht simulator and used to create a live ghost boat simulation that can be projected onto the racecourse via AR and VR graphics. It will show the optimal path that the crews should take given the measured variations in wind pressure, sheers, orientation, and speed.

To accurately collect raw wind data, three LiDARs have been positioned along the Barcelona waterfront overlooking the racecourse, scanning the full race area. Each LiDAR has an average 6.5-km scanning range, up to a maximum of 12 km, and measures wind speeds every 1.5 meters, from 0 to 12 km, up to 38 m/s (73 knots) with an accuracy of

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