Myself and another climbing buddy have started a project to replicate famous outdoor climbing routes, indoors. See https://outerin.rocks/ for a quick run down of how we do it.
We're currently reaching out to climbers to see if this is something they're interested in. So we'd love to hear from you!
Please chuck any suggestions / questions / queries down below.
We're potentially looking to set the process as a community based tool. So we're interested to find out if climbers would be interested in scanning local climbs themselves?
Video: Here's a scan we did of a small bouldering problem in Queens Park Sydney. Scanning the whole cliff is useful for positioning/orientating the individual holds, which we scan individually to achieve a high level of detail.
Can you talk a little more about how you would replicate the outdoor routes inside a gym environment? Are you casting specific holds? Planning out indoor gym routes using standard holds?
On the point about climbers scanning their local climbs themselves, just make sure to give very specific instructions on what you expect. I've started scanning local outdoor climbing routes as well (using photogrammetry), and I know I am very particular about the quality of the images, how they are taken, settings used and many more details because poor image quality leads to poor 3d models or no alignment (and no 3d model) at all. I could be very wrong, but most climbers don't have the understanding of photogrammetry to know what makes for a good dataset of images. Perhaps look to find climbers that are also well versed in photogrammetry (like myself and at least one other on this forum) that could help build a database of 3d routes.
You're right. Although most people have the camera tech in their pocket the actual process requires a fair bit of refinement to get just right. For this reason we'll be building up a small team to conduct the capturing process. This will mostly consist of local climbing experts and other climbers who are well versed in photogrammetry, like yourself.
Broadly our process is: Photogrammetry → Digital modeling → 3D printing → Conventional moulding. So we'll be recreating the geometry of the contact points from famous climbs and then mounting these indoors with the same relative position and orientation. Our website ( outerin.rocks/) has a bit more information if you're interested.
We're aiming to make great outdoor climbs accessible to the community, especially for those who couldn't climb them otherwise (time, cost, money, safety, travel etc.)
If you keen to have a better chat about the project feel free to shoot me an email :)
You're right. It'd take a huge amount of effort to replicate an outdoor route with standard holds, even if it was possible with the gyms fixed walls.
What we plan on doing is providing replicas of the outdoor routes holds, accompanied by relative position and orientation measurements. This way you can quickly screw/bolt them into the right place, without having to guess and check. We've also developed some software which'll let gyms know which routes they can/cannot mount based on the size/angle of their walls.
There's definitely big differences between indoors and outdoors, and we're never going to be able to replicate the experience of being out in nature. But, we're hoping indoor climbers are interested in trying some of the cool sequences of the outdoor classics. Especially the ones that are overseas which they may not ever have the time or money to visit.
In terms of it being a huge investment, we actually manufacture the holds from conventional materials. This means we can sell the holds for a the same price as standard holds and that the same tried and tested materials can be used.
Thanks for the feedback, keen to hear any other thoughts you have.
As far as I know, the market for this would be someone training that one very specific sequence they need to finally send a years-long project. So a target market would be very small and more often be people setting on a woody at home than a gym.
One of the gyms in Austin had a replica of some geometry from Hueco in one part of the building. For years it appeared to gather more dust than chalk, and I was told that it was eventually torn down to make room for stuff people would actually get on.
I live 5-6 hours away from any real crag. It would be sweet to train on a real route. Half of the setters at my gym have never climbed outside so they're just phoning it in
Several years ago, I was going to a gym in Santa Monica, and they had a bouldering corridor that was set up for long traverses. I worked a sloper problem over several weeks. I learned a bunch of techniques that were new to me. Later that summer I did Rosy Crucfixion, and the first pitch had pretty much the same kind of moves. I attribute my success to all the gym practice. Given that experience, I’m all for it. But maybe you don’t have reproduce climbs exactly. Maybe geometry is enough. If we had gym routes that were presented like this: “Want to climb White Lightning? Try this...”, that would be pretty cool. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be helpful. I’ve even discussed this possibility with the head route setter at my gym.
Nick Gilmore wrote: You're right. It'd take a huge amount of effort to replicate an outdoor route with standard holds, even if it was possible with the gyms fixed walls.
What we plan on doing is providing replicas of the outdoor routes holds, accompanied by relative position and orientation measurements. This way you can quickly screw/bolt them into the right place, without having to guess and check. We've also developed some software which'll let gyms know which routes they can/cannot mount based on the size/angle of their walls.
There's definitely big differences between indoors and outdoors, and we're never going to be able to replicate the experience of being out in nature. But, we're hoping indoor climbers are interested in trying some of the cool sequences of the outdoor classics. Especially the ones that are overseas which they may not ever have the time or money to visit.
In terms of it being a huge investment, we actually manufacture the holds from conventional materials. This means we can sell the holds for a the same price as standard holds and that the same tried and tested materials can be used.
Thanks for the feedback, keen to hear any other thoughts you have.
How will you decide which few dozen small sections of rock constitute "the outdoor route's holds"?
You obviously have to miss out on the nature, view, position, and exposure, you won't be able to replicate any of the terrain features, angles, or traversing nature of any climbs, you have to choose a single ~30' section of a climb, and you have to artificially select a few dozen tiny sections of rock that someone decides are THE holds that should be used on this route. After all that, I can't see how any remote resemblance to the original route will be retained in any meaningful way, and when you consider the time, energy, and expense of single-purpose specialized holds, I just can't see the point. Why not replicate really high quality GYM routes to put in other gyms? Route setting quality varies widely, and not every gym is able to hire skilled, experienced route setters. What about a library of quality routes of a variety of styles and grades, you can sell sets of holds and "maps" of routes indicating position of holds like you mentioned, and match them to gyms based on their wall size, angles, etc. ? If you use this idea I want 5%.
Thanks everyone for all the feedback! It is really awesome.
Feel free to keep the questions and comments coming through.
Sorry for the long post, I’ve tried to respond to everyone.
John Wilder Yeh, if holds are only good for a single purpose then it’s pretty hard for gyms to make a return on their investment (before the route gets boring). A big focus in our route selection and digital modelling is to make the holds versatile, so they can be mixed into new routes in the future. Working with the crags local gurus and talented hold shapers will help us do this.
We’ve also played around with a subscription idea. This is where gyms rent out a famous route for a month or so before we come swap it out for a new route. This way gyms can have a fresh rotation of interesting routes. We’d make sure to clean the holds between gyms and keep the delivery pick up as easy as possible. We’ve talked to some people who’ve thought of similar climbing hold co-op ideas like this. The biggest challenge is making it financially viable to operate. What do you think?
When you buy in colours does each colour represent a difficulty or certain style? Because we mold with traditional method we can make holds in any colour that suits you. Do you see replica holds clashing with your current use of colours?
We’re hoping indoor climbers are intrigued enough to give the hold a go. The idea of climbing replicas of natures best routes just might be intriguing enough. We’ve done some surveys and interview which suggest this might be the case. But, we definitely need to keep talking to climbers and to run some pilots to figure out if this is right or not.
Tradgic Yogurt. For sure. It might just give that extra 1% for a stubborn project. We’re trying to figure out a way to open up the tech. so climbers can use it for this purpose.
Yeh. I don’t think these replica routes would remain interesting for much longer than normal routes. For the replica holds to work they need to be quality holds in their own respect (durable, versatile, aesthetic).
Justin That’s rough man! Glad to hear you interested in something like this.
Em Choosing these sections of rock is a BIG challenge. Every climber, whether their just beginning or a pro, will approach a route differently. The routes we offer will be ‘curated’ by a local expert. Someone who’s been climbing that particular area for years or even written guide books on it. They’ll have the best knowledge of which holds are used in the various ways to climb up. It’s too expensive to recreate the entire wall, so we’ll have to give a lot of thought to which holds to replicate. Hopefully this gives people a reason to go check out the real thing, once they’ve tried out the replica in their gym.
Yeh. We’re never going to be able to replicate the full experience of being outdoor. Were just trying to replicate the physical feeling and movements of some of these classic climbs nature has crafted. It can be really hard for someone to visit all of these spots (15 hour flight to Yosemite for me) so we’re trying to give people a taste of these climbs that they might have never otherwise had.
We’ve been surprised which routes can fit onto the fixed angled climbing gym walls. But, there are definitely some awesome rock formations which’ll just be impossible for us to replicate (without buying 100 or so custom volumes). We’re going to be recreating bouldering routes to start, as smaller sections will be easier to replicate properly.
Absolutely. Moon Board has done an awesome job creating collaboration on climbing routes all around the world. We want to try create this kind of collaboration too. Luckily for us the positioning tech. we developed (so route setters can recreate outdoor routes) works really well for routsettesr sharing their own climbs (so other routsetters can recreate their climbs).
patto
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Jun 24, 2018
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Unknown Hometown
· Joined Jul 2012
· Points: 25
Technology..... Just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean you should.
Every outdoor climb is unique. And you have to try deliberately to make any indoor climb non unique. What is the goal in removing uniqueness? Crowds? In which case start with the Nose....
Kudos for trying to the meeting the challenges of your goal. But I question the benefit of the goal.
I try to do that, but mostly from memory as the indoor surfaces never have anywhere near the same structure. That and it isn't important to me to *exactly* duplicate what I find interesting on an outside route, but just get the idea, then I adjust the hold placement, and type/orientation to make it interesting.
However, I think this is an interesting idea, and I never would have thought of that. Way to go!
G Egbert wrote: Vertical Endeavors in Glendale Heights, IL tried this the old fashioned way with tape measures and pictures. They replicated some Devils Tower routes and one from Yosemite. I haven’t been to the gym or climbed any of the routes outside so I can’t speak to the experience. You should chat with them about their experience bringing the outside in.
That's my home gym. I've often wondered how good of a job they did at replicating the target routes. I will say that as far as artificial cracks go, they're regarded as pretty decent. I've never climbed at Yosemite or Devil's Tower, though, so I'm not sure how faithfully they replicate the experience.
patto Good point. I guess we’re not trying to remove uniqueness. I think even if we replicate the holds shape, position and orientation it still won’t be the same as the outdoors. But, hopefully it can give people a taste of some of these outdoor climbs, especially for those who can’t afford to get to the real thing. We’ll definitely be careful of this ‘uniqueness’ going forward though. Thanks for letting us know.
Grandpa Dave That’s interesting. I like the idea of using an outdoor route as inspiration for your own created routes. We’ve talked to a couple of route setters that like to do a similar thing. Once we’ve got the coordinates of each of the holds we’ve got some software which’ll let us know which wall orientations it can/can’t fit onto. We’ve been surprised which routes will fit onto which indoor walls, but we’ll definitely have to target some more standard wall orientations to start. Thanks!
Dan Some companies do build entire boulders for climbing. Could be interesting to do an entire replica of a boulder for gyms to mount holds onto. Generally the trends has been toward flat walls. This is because they offer a lot more customization options for routes, which keeps things interesting.
Update climber I’d love to read that article! Let me know if you find it. It’d save us a lot of time if someone had shown classic climbs would be bad indoors.
David S For sure! Sites like Mountain Project and The Crag have been awesome for researching routes. They’ve also shown climbers love sharing. In a similar way, if we could get climbers to scan cliffs then we could build up a data base of scans for every crag. This is hard to make work from a business perspective (lot of time, computing power, no early revenue streams) but something we definitely want to try do in the future.
G Egbert Thanks man. We’ll shoot them an email and try have a chat. There has been a couple of similar things done in the past so definitely want to learn from their experiences.
s.price I think Franklin Climbing did something like this in the early 2000’s. They were taking physical moulds of the hold and then recreating them this way. There is also a bit of research done on this by Utah University and Force climbing. Check them out if you want to see what others are doing in the area.
Andrew Krajnik Interesting to hear. I think it’s important to show people how similar the replica route is to the real thing. Luckily, with the 3D scans there are a couple of cool ways to do this. I’ll probably make a separate thread about this alter down the line when we’ve got the method more down pat.
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