March 2024 Update
Hey there!
A second update post, but sadly a less eventful one (hopefully one-of-a-kind).
Since Tomáš was working on a different university project for the first half of March and was gone on a holiday for the second half, there was essentially no progress on the backend, which currently needs it the most.
From the progress that was made, it was running into different kinds of bugs on the new data, like different handling of EXIF metadata wrt. image rotation (inconsistently handled/ignored), which breaks segmentation. Also, some unexplained texturing crashes despite the mesh being manifold have to be debugged.
Most importantly, the current approach of sparse reconstruction for rebuilding the boulders is flawed – at the moment, we first perform a sparse reconstruction and then align it to another one, which doesn’t work since while the local geometry will be similar, there will be great differences the further apart you look. We thought of this when implementing it but thought it wouldn’t be much of an issue; turns out it is!
The fix should be to first localize the boulder images on the wall and then register the others, which should be hopefully relatively simple, although hours have been burned away on simpler things.
We would like to make it a point in these monthly updates to always include something visual, however small it might be (so it’s not just a bunch of boring text), so here is one possible poster design for a gym using Climbuddy.
![Possible Climbuddy poster design for Crimp.](/assets/2024-03-poster.webp)
Once the product is somewhat stable, the design of things like this will be handed to someone who actually knows what they’re doing (although Tom really is trying his best).
Looking forward to a more exciting April!
Team Climbuddy