Why skiing needs an offline performance recorder
Skiing is one of the few high-speed sports without a black box.
Every commercial flight has one. Every Formula 1 car has one. Every Tesla has one. But skiing—where recreational speeds routinely reach 40-60 km/h on variable terrain—has nothing.
Current technology focuses on the wrong metrics. GPS tracks show where you went, not how you skied. Speed data measures velocity, not technique. Video requires stopping to review. And cloud-based apps fail when you need them most—in the mountains.
None of these capture the dynamic signature of how a skier actually moves through terrain.
A Ski Black Box is a local, offline performance recorder that captures the complete picture of every run.
Your movement dynamics. Your GPS tracks. Your technique scores. All stored locally, owned entirely by you.
Works in remote mountains with zero signal. All processing happens on-device.
Anonymous by default. No accounts, no email, no sign-up.
All data stays on your device. Nothing is ever uploaded.
GPS tracks, technique scores, and all session data stored exclusively on your device.
Your data in open formats: CSV, GPX, JSON. No vendor lock-in, full portability.
Learning and protection, not social sharing or leaderboards.
What a Ski Black Box captures.
Your personal BPM
Edge-to-edge timing
Smoothness variance
Left/right balance
Route & altitude
Session score (0-100)
A standard benefits the entire ecosystem.
Objective feedback without video
Data-driven teaching
Standardized assessment
Safety analytics
R&D feedback
Incident analysis
A working implementation already exists.
The first Ski Black Box is live on the App Store as SkiCoach.app—a privacy-first, 100% offline ski coaching application built in Austria.
"I don't sell an app. I'm proposing a new primitive for skiing."
A detailed technical paper explaining the Ski Black Box concept, implementation, and vision for the future of ski performance recording.
Download Whitepaper (PDF)6 pages • Free download