“There’s always a winter season in progress!”: There’s probably no better motto for the Shape Academy’s strongest technical development focus of the last year. We talk about the digital facility planning which represents an important technical support tool for the facility build-up this winter. The goal is to ensure a resource-friendly and efficient handling of our facilities’ building material: the snow.
In a first step, the fully set up facilities were measured last winter, and all necessary data was collected by our Technical Managers: With the help of these data sets, digital facility models of existing QParks, Funslopes and Funcross facilities were created – und thus, we are taking a look into the future so to speak. By means of the newly acquired know-how, it’s now possible to develop such models without the facility ever having been built yet.
The basis is a digital model of the terrain without a snow layer that is accurate to the centimeter. In the following, a precise, digital model of the snow facility is created and placed on the base area. Then, the optimization process can begin: Effectively, obstacles are placed at the spot where they need the least snow.
Nevertheless, a model like this doesn’t help at all when it’s not used during the buildup. Therefore, the use of the digital facility planning was an important part of the training for snowcat operators that took place in Obergurgl in November. The facility’s digitally optimized model is linked to the Prinoth’s snow depth measurement system. This way the system allows the snowcat operators to know where they are within the planned facility, how much snow is needed at the respective spot and how the facility is supposed to look like after all.
Please have a look at the clip to get an impression of how the digital facility planning looks like in practice – in the office and on the mountain:
Here we would like to show you a Vimeo video.