Show HN: My local climbing gym from photogrammetry
Commented on yesterday's Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026), thought I might as well submit a Show HN. If you see climbing world cup/championship, there is this 3D modelling thing [1]. I want that for my weekly bouldering. I scanned my local climbing gym into 3D mesh using iphone. Built a simple editor to trim, merge, move/rotate meshes. You can interact with the mesh, view routes, view climb, etc. So this is unlike many gaussian splatting projects where the main use is for viewing. I built a pipeline in updating climbing walls. Climbing routes are manually annotated. Climbing videos are registered against the 3D mesh. Based on one input video, body positions resolved into 3D/4D space. you can view the body landmarks from different angle. COLMAP, OpenMVS, fastapi, svelte, database is just local json files. A read only build is exported so I can host on github page If you climb, or know someone who climbs, would love to hear your feedback. Do you usually record your climbs? If I make this a service, what will make you use it? [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8zdUOaCr6DY
Discussion Highlights (3 comments)
poetril
I’m a very active climber, and record a lot of my climbs. I think at a glance there are two things that would make me hesitant to start using this. Firstly, my gym rotates sets weekly and re-recording each wall each week seems repetitive. Secondly and more importantly, I’m not sure how valuable information this would be. Maybe for outdoor problems, or system boards? It’s inarguably really cool, but I’m not sure how I’d actually incorporate into my sessions.
gyania
This is awesome. Being able to "walk" around the climber is such a cool idea!
zilue
This is an interesting idea. I was wondering if the app contain following features could make it better, loved to discuss them: 1. There will be a weekly weekly leaderboard on the app for different walls and routes. Climbers need upload and share videos of their attemptes to qualify for the leaderboard. Since the app could resolve the input video into 3D/4Dspace, it could automatically determine and calculate the time that each climber takes to finish the route. The leaderboard resets every week, based on the gym's route-setting schedule. 2. For beginners, it can be difficult for them to identify the correct sequence of moves. If you could partnered with the gyms to place a QR code on each wall, climbers could scan it to view the recommended beta or move sequence on the app when they are stuck. That would be really helpful.