14 years old, flying 30m+, living 2 hours from a kite spot and touches the 100 km/h mark during a kite loop. Crazy! If my name would be Maarten Haeger or Get high with Mike I would start to get nervous about this boosting kid Jamie Overbeek. He not only impresses. He also provides. Some very interesting jump height data comes right from his sessions. He installed four devices. One of them is (also) a new kid on the block; The Surfr app. A full range -from 5 to 30 meters- data test to see how they compare.
WOO Sports and Surfr App
A lot of us love the addition of the WOO leaderboard competition. Who jumped the highest today? Or for all-time for one spot. A continent. Or -as Jamie does- competition world wide. But one disadvantage; it costs 200+ Euro.
So speaking of competition: Woo has -after PIQ and the disapeared Xensr– a new one coming up. The Surfr app.
And this one is free. Free when you disregard the use of your phone -which it uses for motion detection- and the board mount. The Surfr app can also be used without a mount on your board (‘wetsuit mode’) but that is currently only in beta mode available. The app -for now- is to be used ideally on the board. A nice bonus from the Surfr app is the immediate and clear jump height. And there is more…like gps tracking, maximum speed and distance travelled.
Two questions on the Surfr app
When Surfr app appeared about 6 months ago it raised two questions. One is on the mount. A phone needs to be put in it. How safe is the mount? Will the water stay out?
We make pretty rough landings. Does the mount stay -with the phone- on the board? On this we have no answers as the mount is (still) delayed to be delivered.
The second question is on the data; how comparable are the WOO and Surfr data? This is where Jamie’s jumps comes with answers. He has a prototype mount Surfr, two WOO 3.0 and one WOO 2.0 and the ability to jump high. Really high.
And those answers contain a lot of interesting data. As shown further below. But in short we are impressed by the comparability. All four devices at the maximum jump height were within 1.2 meter. On 30m that is only a 4% difference. A difference that is below what we commonly see between 2 similar WOO’s. And far less over what we know between a WOO 3.0 and 2.0.
Details for data geeks
That the highest jumps are similar can be a coincidence. So we did look deeper into the data of all 4 devices. Out of the 46 jumps (above 5m) we noticed some deviations at (only) 3 moments. A very good start. But if those three mess up the whole game by giving ridiculous results the game is completely spoiled. Like we noted in 2016 on the Xsenr.
The first and most suspicious deviation is shown in the red circle. 3 WOO’s declare this jump a 4 to 5 meter jump (!) while the Surfr app is showing a 20.4m jump. Wow. That either means the Surfr App is totally wrong -although some of us would like to show off with such a 20+m jump- or 3 WOO’s missed out quite a significant jump. At first we were disappointed. Because if the Surfr app has these errors it means it ruins its own game. Herbert Vuijk -founder, developer and tester at Surfr- had a look at this specific jump on our request.
He is very convinced it is a real 20m jump and backed it up with a impressive but difficult graph on the data of the Surfr. But the 6 second hangtime is already a hunch this isn’t a 5 meter jump. What is more understandable is that there is something odd on the 2 WOO 3.0’s on this specific jump. Both had two jumps within a few seconds with very unrealistic short hangtimes. The WOO 2.0 does not have any clews that the 4.2m jump has errors. Which leaves it more or less 1 WOO 2.0 low jump versus the Surfr app high jump. When we spoke to Jamie he explained that he remembered that he needed to do a lot of downloops -it was a gusty day- to catch him from going down. Which is known to create difficult readings and makes a WOO disregard a (part of) a jump. We do believe the 20m jump from Surfr rather than the 3 WOO’s with only 4 to 5m.
There were two more jumps were the WOO’s clearly came up with some strange strange results. Two out of the three jumps had deviations within the WOO’s. Like in the example below where two jumps occur in the same time stamp which isn’t possible.
It seems WOO tries to disregard or split up strange jumps a bit sooner than the Surfr app. If we delete these 3 jumps we get a very impressive equivalent Surfr app compared to the WOO’s. It is a few % off. Just like 2 WOO 3.0’s do.
You can almost sense the next step…a WOO – Surfr app combined leaderboard.
List Price
Surfr App -free
Surfr App mount (expected end of 2020) 35 Euro excluding shipping.
Reaction on the review from Surfr
Herbert “Very nice that surfr vs woo correlates just as much as WOO vs WOO, top result as far as I am concerned. Especially when you consider that I didn’t specifically try my best for that. I have tried to build the best app possible, and I love that it now works so well.”