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2.4 Documenting and Reliving Experience
Levenhagen [15] comments that due to a sense of flow that exists in climbing it
is apparent that climbers can also experience a sense of loss after the climb is
completed. Simpson expresses how after his own climbing experience there is a
“post-coital depression, [a] fleeting saddening loss when it is over”
[22, p.116-
117]. An extreme example of reliving previous experience was undertaken by
Conrad Anker [18] who, using equipment relevant to the period, attempted to
see if George Mallory (a pioneering climber whose body was found on Mount
Everest) would have actually made it to the summit before he died. It is therefore
apparent that the desire to relive the experience or document one's climb is
another key motivation.
2.5 Experiencing Beauty and Nature
Vomacko and Gavel [25] discuss how beauty of mountains is a strong motiva-
tional factor which reinforces earlier work detailing how wilderness plays a key
factor in adventure pursuits [8, 9]. Additional work has also discussed how moun-
tains are naturally attractive to climbers [24] further enforcing that experiencing
beauty and nature is a high motivational factor to climbers.
3 Motivational Themes Present in Existing Digital
Climbing Experiences
In this section we look at several existing digital climbing experiences which we
have grouped according to their shared design properties, i.e. interactive climb-
ing walls, augmented and projection based systems and wearable systems. We
identify the themes that are supported by these existing experiences and present
design opportunities which theorise how each experience could incorporate the
themes they do not currently support. We picked these systems by querying
search terms such as “interactive climbing walls” and “climbing experience”
on both the ACM Digital Library and Google, and choosing a selection that
matched the above groupings.
3.1
Interactive Climbing Walls
There has been an interest in creating digital climbing walls solely for the purpose
of providing new experiences for climbers. The
Digiwall
[16], for example, is an
interactive climbing wall complete with custom hand and foot holds and an
interactive sound system. The holds detect when they are touched and also
have the ability to light up and illuminate different routes. Additionally the
Digiwall
has several games built into it based around these interactive holds
such as encouraging the climber to touch the correct hold when it is illuminated.
Similarly the
Wall-O-Tron
[3] makes use of a lighting system to suggest routes
or holds that climbers need to interact with.
