Canoe building plan

Auckland, New Zealand Vesper Marine, a leading manufacturer of innovative marine safety products, announced today that its Virtual AIS Beacon for Aids to Navigation has been selected by the America’s Cup Event Authority to provide critical safety information at the Louis Vuitton challenger series and the 34th AC Finals held this September on San Francisco Bay. A truly innovative technology, the Vesper Marine Virtual AIS Beacon will be used to establish a Virtual Aid to Navigation perimeter that clearly outlines the racecourse the for AC event. Broadcast using the international standardized marine Automatic Identification System (AIS), changes to the course can be made in real time ensuring the ultimate in safety for spectators and other local San Francisco marine traffic.

Complementing a private system already used by AC organizers to manage the race and notify race boats of approaching boundaries, Vesper Marine’s technology has been implanted to address safety concerns for on-the-water spectators and general marine traffic that uses the busy waterway. Authorized race officials will collect real time information from race marshals, calculate condition-dependent course boundaries and, using Vesper Marine’s application programming interface (API), send information to the beacon automatically. The beacon will establish a virtual fence around the course and broadcast this information to the public using AIS frequencies, essentially painting the course on surrounding vessels’ dedicated AIS displays and navigation systems to clearly outline boundaries and other critical safety information. As a result, spectator and official vessels can quickly and easily see their own positions relative to the course boundaries on their navigation displays to ensure they are safely outside the course at all times.

“Vesper Marine's Virtual AIS Beacon proved its worth during the 2012 America’s Cup World Series races on San Francisco Bay allowing America’s Cup Race Management to communicate the location of the race boundaries,” said Stan Honey, director of technology for the 34th America’s Cup and one of the inventors of televised football’s ‘first-down’ technology. “We used it to broadcast the location of the boundaries around the racecourse to the spectator fleet, similar to the way we use graphic overlays to show the same boundary locations to those enjoying the race on TV. We are confident that Vesper’s technology will continue to greatly improve operations and communications for everyone during the main event!”

http://www.vespermarine.com/news/americas_cup_2013/