Slopes Interactive Maps
As of this season, Slopes is a team of seven full-time employees, two contractors, two interns, and me. 🤯 Everything you’ve seen in Slopes over the past few years around interactive resort maps is the kind of feature only an amazing team can pull off. I thought it’d be cool to start pulling back the curtain and allow others at Slopes to share the awesome stuff they’ve been cooking up directly with you, beginning with Jess and Lydia from our mapping team…
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We’ve been consistently expanding our coverage of 3D interactive maps since they were first introduced in 2021. And now, we’re kicking off this season with over 1,500 new resorts added to the list, bringing our total coverage to 2,000+ resorts across the world. About 650 of these areas feature custom Slopes mapping meticulously crafted by our team, while the rest are sourced through a special integration with OpenStreetMap (OSM).
I’m pleased to see that Slopes is doing so well, even though many resorts now have their own free apps that offer some similar features as well as access to their own private realtime data.
Mapping ski resorts from scratch, we use GIS software to layer our data over high-resolution imagery and other spatial datasets. This imagery, often at 1-meter resolution in many parts of the world, comes from satellite and aerial sources. We use it as a reference to manually draw resort features (yup, that's right, we draw overlays by hand) in their correct geographic locations. The fine resolution of the imagery allows us to clearly map lifts and resort buildings.
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We use fully anonymized data from Slopes recordings to improve the accuracy of our maps. We plot a subset of this data as a heatmap and layer it under the resort. Combined with official trail maps, we are then able to determine where to add run lines, and their orientations. This information removes the guesswork and provides us with good accuracy.
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