Where eagles dare
To give the goggles a thorough workout I really needed to take them to the Rockies or the Alps, but there's a limit to what I'm ready to do for El Reg. and being found dead on the side of a mountain next spring or plastered against the trunk of a pine tree goes well beyond it.
Eyecatching, by design
An altogether more convenient and safer test was conducted at the Chill Factore winter sports center in Manchester. A few runs down the main slope and the goggles did exactly what it says on the box despite being under a roof.
According to the display I managed to hit a shade over 40mph at one point. OK, that's a bit short of the 156.2mph world record but fast enough for me when indoors.
Verdict
At £450, you will have to want the GPS functionality badly to justify the cost. However, the Transcends are an excellent pair of winter sports goggles and the GPS tracking system does everything it claims to. If you are a snow sports fan who wants to hunker over a laptop with your mates comparing the routes you took down a run and the time it took, then they are ideal and I suspect para-gliders and microlight pilots could find a use for them too. ®
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COMMENTS
Ideal for long distance cross-country skiers
Cross country skiers will find these useful, particularly the hardy souls who don't follow the beaten trail,
Might even prove useful for Canadians living in the north when they check their trap lines.
Navigation
Does it have any form of waypoint storage so you can use it to guide you around a large ski resort, or even point you to civilisation?
Memories of a complete white out, followed by about three hours stumbling down the wrong bit of the hill to the bar are coming back to haunt me, if only because being the wrong bit of hill the bar wasn't there...
And wingsuiting skydivers also
http://twitpic.com/3e06a2
+1
Nice idea, but as said above just WAY too expensive for the abuse and short lifespan of most ski goggles. And frankly, at THAT price I don't want "an anti-fog coating", I want dual-pane sealed lenses like Uvex and Oakley offer that are FOG-FREE (almost). I can put up with single-pane coated lenses in a set of Bolles at £55, but NOT at that price. (And at that price, I want my Vermillion lenses, not junky orange!)
@JaitcH
Maybe not, bcos as I read the article they only record your position and don't actually tell you where you are.
@Laird, ultralights don't have much instrumentation, but what they have is essential. Gliders need a vario to say whether you're going up or down, and GPS isn't sensitive enough to track up/down accurately. And all aircraft need an altimeter which *always* works off air pressure so using a GPS could result in you sharing airspace with a 747 on approach. Powered aircraft may want to know speed too, but that's *always* airspeed, so again a GPS ain't much use.
