Gadgetory

this wave compares to some of the funnest ways you'll ever surf in the world obviously every waves unique somewhere is a short summer long your legs are burning after you're done it's a really long ride this wave offers a little bit everything but what it really offers is a perfect wave hi I'm Kelly Slater and we are at surf if humans want control so I think this is tapping into the control element of making a wave this surfer is an artificial wave that we worked on starting in about 2005 2006 finally has come to fruition here this is our prototype the first man-made wave that has a lot of power to it what they call a solitary wave or a soliton which is which the way that essentially you could send for a long period of long distance over a long distance and not lose any energy there are a lot of angles and sections and kind of quirky weird things that that happen on waves in the ocean that definitely don't happen here you know this thing is built to be kind of a perfect wave more of something you would draw or imagine your in your mind right now we probably run maybe like a dozen different waves you'll see halfway down here there's a control tower so if a surface in the water and he said I'd like this type of wave and we have different names for the different waves the bigger ones smaller ones and so they can radio in to the control tower and the operator will set it for that wave once he once the wave is called the operator will press a few buttons and then inside these houses over here at either end we call them the winch houses there's large winches that will then start pulling that rope that you see rolling there and it will pull the big blue thing which is a hydrofoil with that select wheel makes the wave that object is designed such that when it's pulled at the correct speed and in the correct depth of water with the correct width symmetry the reef that we have the built in here it will create these select selection of waves one of the things we have been working on is air sections so we worked very hard to create a nice section towards the end where they can we generate a ramp and a landing with some nice white waters we didn't know 100% it was gonna work like we had designed it to as my partner Jeff says he said if it doesn't work we can just shut the whole thing down and cover it over no one will ever know but I think the ultimate for us is just to keep keep working keep redesigning this is we've always had this our prototype it's a work in progress and we'll sort of keep it that way I think hi I'm Samantha Sibley I'm a member of the USA search team and we're here in Waco this is the home of USA Olympic surfing this is our first official training here at the BSR cable park ere's are something that I struggle with and here it offers the repetition and I can just practice them over and over again VSR surf resort is the world's first high-performance open to the public wave technology the way that we power our waves is actually pretty simple it's air pressure and gravity so our machine is a pneumatic machine and that's different than other technologies which have moving parts in the water we have no moving parts in the water so the way we produce our waves is we generate a lot of pressure and then we make a way of utilizing that pressure the secret sauce to all that is that we can sequence how that pressure is applied to the water so because of that we can manipulate and change the way the waves form and spit out of our way of generating chambers up in the tower I have a console or controller as we call it it's touchscreen and that's what we use to design the waves it's also what we use to produce the playlist play them throughout the public sessions and everything we have a three wave set that has 12 seconds in between each wave now we've produced that once every one minute and 10 seconds the average wave duration that you're standing on the board is eight to ten seconds the beauty of our system is that we can keep creating new waves it's just really good for working on like progression in the ocean you're you never know what's gonna happen and out here you always know that the wave is going to be the same we have the technology now through our alliance with surf line surf forecasters in California we can go back and look at the storms from the last 50 years and look at how those swells hit the beach break in Tokyo where the Olympics is at and literally a computer model replicate any type of wave angles swell direction that we're gonna see and then we can take that information and put it in the system here at DSR feels really close to the ocean it's just weird because you're surfing in like a totally different scenery this one is more fun like way better for like training and stuff like Kelly's just longer and like we're perfect but you don't get as many ways and this one's more like your real wave kinda like house is more fake but perfect nothing will ever replace the ocean the feeling that you get when you show up on the beach and the waves are just perfect and no one is around and you don't know what to expect that I don't know what's gonna happen before you paddle out but you still throw yourself out there nothing will ever replace that from a performance and a sport standpoint the wave pools offer something we've never had which is a training tool there's so many different variations in ways that you can manipulate the way water moves I mean this is the tip of the iceberg