Meet the augmented reality ski app that turns the slopes into a computer game

Siri, Alexa and Cortana have got a new friend, and this one lives in the mountains. Known as Skadi, she’s an app that can guide users around a ski resort, talking softly into your headphones, picking the best routes for your ability and making sure you get to lunch on time.

Skiadi can also be set to create a bespoke ski safari, taking into account information such as ability, a desire to try new runs or avoid drag lifts, and adding in waypoints for any restaurants or lifts you’d like to swing by at specific times.

And just like a Sat Nav, Skadi recalculates the route should you take a wrong turning or decide that the run down through the trees looks more appealing than where she was going to send you. Unlike Sat Nav, Skadi will also warn you if you’re running out of time to make the last gondola or connecting chairlift.

“Our aim,” says app developer Ivan Mikhaylov, “is to encourage skiers and snowboarders to explore more. Without Skadi, most visitors to a resort only tackle about 15 per cent of the ski area. Skadi opens that up and encourages visitors to try new runs.”

The developers have spent the past couple of years creating their own geo-data, so elevation, altitude and gradients are built into every resort map in the app. Skadi is currently available in 45 resorts around the world, including Kitzbühel and Ischgl in Austria, Tignes and Les Deux Alpes in France and Zermatt and Laax in Switzerland. The team hope to have increased that to 65 by the end of this season.

Incredibly, all this data and service is free. Download the app, download the map for your resort, and you’re good to go. It can be used either offline, to save battery life and mobile data, or connected to the internet, so you can receive real-time lift status updates.

If, however, you’re thinking that’s all well and good but I need a little more gaming on my groomers, Skadi is also an augmented reality experience. Yes, augmented reality – the integration of visual and audio content with a game player’s real-time environment – has arrived on snow. In Skadi’s augmented reality, you ride around the pistes on the hunt for crystals, marmots, bears and dwarves. Think Pokémon Go, but on skis – Pokémon Snow. It’s what your inner teenager has been crying out for.

A complete novice at augmented reality, I tried out the game in London’s Hyde Park. To demonstrate the developers’ point that the geo-data mapping software they have created is relatively easy to transfer from resort to resort, they had turned Hyde Park into a virtual ski resort for the morning, complete with objects to find (though sadly without snow or skis to find them on).

Once I’d downloaded the app and the Hyde Park “resort” data (which took up just 5MB on my space-strapped iPhone), I was all set to find as many crystals as I could and try and top the leader board.

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Within two minutes of setting off my phone was pinging as it picked up a couple of crystals in the near vicinity and my score quickly increased when I found a marmot worth five crystals and an ibex worth 10. The game starts to make more sense when you bring in some of the Norse mythology basics the app is based on – Skadi is the goddess of mountains and is known for her hunting prowess, hence why I’m breaking into a run to find all the ibex, bears and dwarves I can.

But won’t the game cause chaos on the slopes if everyone is skiing around, with their phone in their gloved hand, staring at its screen? Mikhaylov assured me Skadi is designed to be played through headphones, giving directions and notifications, while the phone is safely tucked away in a pocket.

Pipped to the top spot because I didn’t find an eagle that would have unlocked a whole other dimension of crystals and points, the game was surprisingly fun, immersive and competitive.

So much so that FIS, the ski industry governing body, announced at the beginning of October that it is going into partnership with Skadi. FIS wants to increase participation in snow sports and believes apps that not only open up resorts to people but also turn them into an interactive playground are the way to do this.

Capitalising on the access this partnership brings, Skadi is offering a premium membership for €14.99 a year that will give users such benefits as free tickets to FIS World Cup competitions and exclusive meet and greets with ski stars. And anyone who downloads the app in the next few months will be entered into a weekly prize draw to win a week’s lift pass at a resort of their choice.

The aim of the partnership is to build the world’s largest digital ski club in the run up to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, and attract younger people to skiing and snowboarding. If the success of Pokémon Go is anything to go by, Skadi will be the online friend we’ll all be wanting to hang out with this winter.

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