U.S. Skiing Employment: East and West

[Excerpt] The skiing facilities industry is limited to establishments that only offer downhill or cross country skiing and no overnight accommodations. Larger resorts with hotels and condominiums are not included in this industry, but rather in the traveler accommodation industry. Skiers from the Eastern States may notice that Vermont is not listed in the table of the top five States for skiing employment, even though it is the most popular destination for the eastern skiing population. A majority of the places to ski in Vermont are resorts with hotels or condominium rentals, which are classified in the traveler accommodation industry. Skiing employment in the Eastern States has remained constant for the most part, with the exception of a spike in January 2003. (See chart 1.) The East Coast experienced multiple snow storms in December 2002, which excited the ski industry’s consumer base. In fact, for the rest of the winter (January-March 2003), El Niño provided fresh snow for the East at the expense of the West. For ski areas in the East, early, substantial snows are often a positive sign, as many of their skiers live in metropolitan areas that are only about 2 or 3 hours from the slopes. This easy access allows skiing to be enjoyed without a lot of advance planning. The flexibility that the eastern ski resorts offer is what has kept their employment stable (if not gradually increasing) for the past 6 years until 2007. In that winter, smaller eastern slopes, which make up this industry, struggled to even make snow because of unusually warm temperatures

Virtual Skiing as an Art Installation

The Virtual Skiing game allows the user to immerse himself into the skiing sensation without using any obvious hardware interfaces. To achieve the movement down the virtual skiing slope the skier who stands on a pair of skis attached to the floor performs the same movements as on real skis, in particular this is the case on carving skis: tilting the body to the left initiates a left turn, tilting the body to the right initiates a right turn, by lowering the body, the speed is increased. The skier observes his progress down the virtual slope projected on the wall in front of him. The skier’s movements are recorded using a video camera placed in front of him and processed on a PC in real time to drive the projected animation of the virtual slope

Downhill racers' dollars

Skis and skiing

Journal Staff

This study is on how leg utilisation may affect skiing efficiency and performance in double-poling ergometry. Three experiments were conducted, each with a different style of the double-poling technique: traditional with small knee range-of-motion and fixed heels (TRAD); modern with large knee range-of-motion and fixed heels (MOD1) and modern with large knee range-of-motion and free heels (MOD2). For each style, motion data were extracted with automatic marker recognition of reflective markers and applied to a 3D full-body musculoskeletal simulation model. Skiing efficiency (skiing work divided by metabolic muscle work) and performance (forward impulse) were computed from the simulation output. Skiing efficiency was 4.5%, 4.1% and 4.1% for TRAD, MOD1 and MOD2, respectively. Performance was 111, 143 and 149Ns for TRAD, MOD1 and MOD2, respectively. Thus, higher lower body utilisation increased the performance but decreased the skiing efficiency. These results demonstrate the potential of musculoskeletal simulations for skiing efficiency estimations.This study was sponsored in part by the Swedish National Centre for Research in Sports (Grant No. 168/09). The Swedish Winter Sports Research Centre provided laboratory resources.Beräkningsbaserad biomekanik inom längdskidåkning - möjligheter och begränsninga

Peripheral Interaction for Sports - Exploring Two Modalities for Real-Time Feedback

We believe that sports is a domain that would both provide valuable input to the area of peripheral interaction, as well as benefit from peripheral interaction itself. We present two pilot studies on peripheral interaction for cross-country skiing and golf using vibration feedback and audio feedback respectively. We believe the results of these initial studies are encouraging and aim to pursue the concept of peripheral interaction for the sports domain