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The future of pre-climb planning and on-the-wall decision making in rock climbing may have just got a lot more digital, thanks to the University of Calgary’s .

Ben Pearman, a master’s student in the , is an avid rock climber and wanted to solve the problem of getting lost while climbing, which can result in serious injury. 

“This was something I imagined when I first started climbing,” says Pearman. “I thought there had to be a better way of doing this than reading a three-sentence description from 30 years ago, but it didn’t exist.”

Pearman decided to turn the problem into a project, which resulted in the app. 

Pearman used a drone to shoot photos of the 240-metre-tall climb known as Red Shirt on Mount Yamnuska and create a 3D digital twin or copy of that section of the rock face. Yumnuska, west of Calgary, is considered the crown jewel of climbing in the Canadian Rockies, with hundreds of classic big-wall climbing routes.

“That in itself is a very helpful thing to have, as most navigation sources have been either written descriptions or drawings,” explains Pearman. 

He then had to figure out how to make that model usable for climbers, both during planning and on the wall. To do so, Pearman worked with seven longtime rock climbers to design and test the app.

One important goal was ensuring the app was completely usable one-handed, so that climbers who needed to consult it at stable points along the climb could do so more safely. 

Pearman and the climbers developed spatial annotations that point out important features on the wall. They also added human-scale avatars to the digital twin to help give climbers a sense of scale as they are looking at specific features. 

Pearman did a public deployment of the app and received positive feedback from the climbing community. 

“In the span of just a few weeks, seven of the people who downloaded the app then climbed Red Shirt,” says Pearman. “Unlike many of the climbers we surveyed who’d used traditional tools, none of the climbers using ThreeTopo got lost, and none of them got off route.”

With the technology and interactions demonstrated in this project, Pearman believes this kind of guidance will become the standard. 

“I think it is an inevitability that most climbing routes will have three-dimensional topos with spatial annotations on them that will look fairly similar to what we’ve done here,” says Pearman. “We may not be the people that do it, but someone will for sure, as we’ve laid the groundwork and shown a very repeatable process for how to do it.”

The ThreeTopo project was presented in Barcelona at (Human Factors in Computing Systems), the world’s top human-computer interaction conference, where it received a best paper award in April 2026. 

The Data Experience Lab, led by , PhD, an associate professor in Computer Science, investigates the intersection of data and everyday human experiences. 

“In addition to thinking about data in physical spaces, we also focus on citizen science and using data in civic contexts. We’re always thinking about the implications of new technologies,” explains Willett. “This includes approaches like data physicalization, which renders data into physical objects and spaces, and immersive analytics, which shows data in the real-world using approaches like mixed reality.”