By Anne Widjaja
For the third year running, SAP will apply its analytics capabilities to provide sailors and spectators at the world’s largest sailing event with exciting racing insights.
SAP will continue to sponsor the Kieler Woche (Kiel Week) in 2012, to be held 16-24 June off the shores of Kiel, Germany.
Since 2010, Kieler Woche has partnered with SAP to enhance the spectator experience, as well as provide sailors themselves with greater analytical insights into sailing tactics.
Stefan Lacher, head of technology for the SAP Sailing Program, describes how developers aimed to expand the limited nature of how audiences’ could experience the race in real time.
“For many, trying to understand what happens out on the water is not easy. Information about which team is ahead, gaining, or losing ground is usually only available at the rounding of the racing buoys or at the finish line.
“Through partnering with GPS tracking suppliers as well as 2- and 3-D visualisation partners, SAP developed tools to analyse GPS data collected from the boats together with integrated wind measurements from sensors on the race course.”
In 2011, as part of the TV broadcast, SAP used this technology to create a sailing analytics leader board that displayed the position of every competitor at any time.
The leader board also showed live race information such as average seeds, distance travelled, estimated time of arrival at the next mark rounding, gaps to leader and gains and losses per leg.
Commentators could also access the latest race data with the click of a button, allowing them unprecedented access to which sailors triumphed and more importantly, how they did it.
Lacher said this gave audiences an exciting new spectator experience, where they could interact with real-time race information, on device and on demand, anywhere in the world.
Since last year’s race, through a user research project, SAP has gained an even better understanding of what spectators and sailors expect from an international sailing event, allowing it to further enhance the user experience for the 2012 event.
