Gear

Your iPhone Is Now Your Ski Instructor

Thanks to Snowcookie, a Highly Advanced New Wearable Technology

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You're on your skis, atop a mountain somewhere in Aspen, not a care in the world except for skiing well—nay, better than you've ever skied before. 

A chill dude approaches, puffing on a vape pen: "Excuse me, sir. I'm your new ski instructor."

To which you say, "No, you must be mistaken. I'm my new ski instructor." 

You point to the big button-like device on your chest and the two big button-like devices attached to your skis. Then you pull out your phone: "See?"

He nods resignedly. You take a hit of his vape, before disappearing down the slopes...

What you've just demonstrated to "chill dude" is the awe-inspiring power of Snowcookie, a highly advanced wearable technology from Switzerland designed to help you improve your shredding or whatever. It was just unveiled at CES, and made available in North America last week (members of the Japanese National Team have already been using it to their advantage for quite some time).

So...you probably want to know how this works. Well, it's pretty complex. But we'll try explaining it in non-technical terms for you (and us—we're not the best when it comes to "technical terms").

After ordering the hardware and downloading the app, you'll want to mount the three "cookies"—one one each ski, and one on a sleek harness you'll wear over your chest—and sync the devices to your phone. Under the "Profile" tab, you'll enter some key factors, like your weight, your height and the type of ski gear you're using. When you're ready to go, you'll head to the "Record" section to record your run—quite literally. The app knows where you are on the mountain and tracks your movement with the kind of "how do they do that?" accuracy you tend to see with the trajectory and distance of golf balls, traced in real time with those colored lines on TV. 

Naturally, it's when the run is over that the real work begins. The app's home page is essentially a chronological feed of every run. The "cookies" track your turning (carving percentage, turn pace and more), your speed (using color gradients to show where you were going your fastest and slowest) and your body position (when you were leaning too far forward or too far back). You can even watch a 3D simulation of your run, or pit one run against another in a simulated race. It's...pretty cool.

The "Improve" tab is probably where you'll be spending most of your time, presuming you're actually trying to, you know, "improve." It'll display a radar chart composed of six elements: carving, endurance, engagement, speed, style and body position, the combination of which determines your ski level (between 1 and 10). Of course, you'll also want to tap each of those headers to get some hints on how to make progress. Then you'll want to get back on the mountain. 

Or hit the hot tub for some much-needed R&R. That's always an option, too.

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