Land Rover BAR | Tactical Aid App

Land Rover BAR, British Challengers for the 35th America’s Cup, required a pioneering new mobile app that could intuitively show critical information throughout the racing – with no user interaction.

The boat itself is embedded with hundreds of sensors, providing real-time data that will allow the team to make swift tactical decisions and optimise their time in the water.

Data from the sensors is served to the Coderus app, which enables critical data to be read in a user-friendly format from the crew’s water-resistant Android tablets and watches.

Optimised for challenging race conditions, hardware and battery performance, and crafted to ensure its operation kept pace with events as they unfolded, the Coderus mobile app solution was used through the America’s Cup racing calendar.

• We create a native Android application.
• We created a smart watch app using WearOS.
• Multiple smart watches were connected to a tablet to give the sailors access to critical information as they moved around the boat.
• A custom scene graph engine was developed to display on screen visualisations
• A recording and replay feature was implemented to allow data sent to the app to be captured and replayed at a later date.

After three months of agile development sprints and testing sessions followed by three months of maintenance, our app was designed to provide the team with critical data about the strategic layout of the course, the position of the boat, how many legs of the race were left and the time and distance to the next boundary – all allowing the team to make swift tactical decisions and giving them maximum time for manoeuvring.

Our app was also designed to tell the team exactly when to power up, allowing them to cross the start line on the very second the race began, gaining a critical advantage by getting the team in front at Mark 1. The technology works on a tablet screen and a smartwatch, offering the crew real-time information about the sailing course. Onboard the boat the team used highly water-resistant Android tablets and watches, while data was collected via hundreds of sensors. The app recorded the relevant data and its own state; if an issue arose during development, this was forwarded to our team, allowing us to continuously improve the functionality.

The Land Rover BAR team reported that the battery performance per device allowed a day’s racing – with up to four races per day. What’s more, our app facilitated the team in being the most tactical leading up to the start of each race and the fastest over the line when countdown finished.