For this Explorer Tale we introduce you to a Stephan Geissler who put VeloViewer to good use during the pandemic to uncover tiles closer to home. Hear how Stephan’s tile hunting took off at Frankfurt airport. Continue reading
Category: Explorer
Explorer Tile Tales – Fuelled by Sausage Rolls
After tales of chocolate being exchanged for access to tiles, it seems VeloViewer adventures are fuelled by food – and this extends much further than a traditional cafe ride! In our latest tale British rider Peter Draper, a retired Professor of Nursing, shares how VeloViewer tile hunting has renewed his passion for cycling and increased his love of sausage rolls.
For our followers outside of the UK who haven’t had the pleasure of trying a sausage roll this is what you’re missing: a piece of sausage meat wrapped in pastry and baked.
Explorer Tile Tales – keep the faith
Discover how British explorer tile hunter and Vicar Graeme kept the faith to secure precious VeloViewer Explorer Tiles by using the currency of chocolate and the powers from above!
Over to Graeme…..
Explorer tile hunting
Our favourite emails to receive are from VeloViewer subscribers with tales of their explorer tile hunting. We’re always shocked at the lengths people go to, but also inspired by adventure seekers who find new ways to claim a tile, along with the buzz it gives them!
We were contacted recently by British Columbian Anna Bonga who shared details of her and her husband’s mountain biking adventure with the sole focus of collecting tiles. The journey involved riding, climbing and bushwhacking through prickly bushes and alongside downed trees, whilst also carrying ice axes just in case the soil gave way and they needed to pull themselves back up the slope! Continue reading
Update to Detailed VeloViewer Explorer Tile Ticking
A post at the geekier end of the spectrum as a couple of small changes to the VeloViewer Explorer Tile calculations are rolled out to fine tune some of those edge-case scenarios where tiles might have been missed. One key area was addressing the very rare occasions where your GPS device didn’t record a point in the required spot as your route crossed the very corner of a tile – the good news is this should now be sorted.
VeloViewer Explorer Tile 3D Heatmap in Google Earth
I’ve wanted to produce this view of VeloViewer Explorer Tiles since I first came up with the idea back in 2015 and can only put my lack of action down to being too busy with the professional teams these last few years! Simple idea though: provide a KML output that can be viewed in Google Earth shows a tower for each ticked Explorer Tile with the height representing the number of times the tile has been visited on your travels.
Veloviewer Explorer Tiles – Global Heatmap
When I meet VeloViewer users out and about, the enjoyment of ticking off VeloViewer Explorer Tiles is the most common feedback I get. Since I came up with the idea of Explorer Tiles back in 2015 1000’s of VeloViewer users have been discovering new roads and trails close to where they live and further afield. A global heatmap of the ticked tiles has been on my to-do list since 2015 so it is embarrassing that it has taken so long to make it a reality! But wait no longer.
VeloViewer Explorer – a GPS Selfie
In August I was contacted by Karl Andersson, an MA student of Visual and Media Anthropology at Freie Unviversität Berlin who was doing a project on the VeloViewer Explorer functionality along with how and why people use it. The link to his survey was shared and many of the most devoted Explorers responded. Karl has now published his findings and also produced a lovely video compiled from interviews carried out with a couple of the Explorers.
Introducing the Explorer Cluster (and configurable explorer visuals)
Since the introduction of the Explorer Score and Explorer Max Square there have been requests for some sort of metric to represent the maximum number of connected Explorer tiles. The recent improvement in the calculation of completed Explorer tiles sparked a very active discussion which resulted in the refinement of the concept and the creation of the Explorer Cluster. The Explorer Max Square provides a hard-core challenge but can be tricky for people who live in geographically challenging areas or have key tiles which are completely inaccessible. This is where the Explorer Cluster looks to provided a more level playing field.
Explorer Tile Calculation Updates
The way that completed Explorer tiles are calculated has remained pretty static since its inception in March 2015 which included some, less than precise code to try to get around some of its known limitations (detailed below). I’ve now refined that code to improve the accuracy and also speed up the processing quite considerably and also introduced a method to get a definitive list of tiles for an Activity. This improved accuracy will of course result in a number of tiles that were previously marked as ticked now showing up as unticked (and potentially affecting your max square size) but only tiles that you never actually visited in the first place 🙂