Eye tracking video on track

[Lonster]

Makes sense to be a little more focused on the trail conditions. I was actually a bit suprised at how far ahead your eyes were most of the time. Ride that trail often D??

Be cool to see how a spr0tbile rider in a group zooming some twistess with 3 friends would be.

Sounds like Budman and I (and a couple others) need this setup to make a HWY36 run.....just sayin....

 

[budman]

Sounds like Budman and I (and a couple others) need this setup to make a HWY36 run.....just sayin....

You are reading my mind..

 

[darkie]

Dylan, do you have any material w/ other bikes around you? I'd find that more interesting, when closing/ passing other riders.

Not a lot at the moment, but next season we will get more for sure.

 

[ThinkFast]

You mention when to look up to the next point, saying “as soon as possible.” This is something we as riders can often intuitively identify, but let me reduce it to a succinct and practical way to convey that idea: you move off a visual target when you feel confident you will arrive at it, then shift to the next area or target. If you move off a visual target too soon, the back-tracking saccade this causes usually results in a loss of precision.

The ‘if’ you mention here is the confidence part that I mentioned that one has to work on and build up. What you say is true - the back-tracking saccade will cause loss of precision. This is, in a nutshell, the whole basis behind my ‘look and let go’ mantra and my assertion that you need to practice ‘look and let go’ and learn to be confident in your brain’s ability to manage your track to your chosen point after you’ve already moved your foveal attention (encompassing about 4-6 degrees of arc IIRC from my earlier research) to the next section of the corner.

Here's a short clip riding my mountain bike.

Excellent. Yes, I was musing about your comments on my mountain biking rides recently, where I find it’s actually easier to practice look and let go technique because of two things: on single track the lines must be tighter than on a motorcycle, and there’s less area to choose from; and the speeds are slower so the distance between the sections of a given corner are closer together, making it easier to look and let go. At least that’s what I’ve found.

In fact, it’s where I figured it out in the first place. I needed to thread my front (and rear) wheel between a rock and root that are about one tire width apart leaving a smooth line laying at a diagonal to my direction of travel. Navigating it successfully requires making a small steering input wiggle at precisely the right moment, requiring millisecond timing on my part.

If I focus on the line between the obstacle all the way until I get to them I almost always hit either the rock or the root. However, if I use a look and let go approach, locking in my desired path well before I get to the obstacle and then move my foveal attention up trail to the next section, I never feel a bump from either my front or rear wheel. In other words, I’ve threaded the needle even though I wasn’t looking at it as I got to it. I’m always surprised that it works, but it always does. The brain is an amazing thing. Look and let go works. At least it works for me. YMMV. Try it and see. (See what I did there? ).

 

[ThinkFast]

PS - I just re-watched the first video at 0.5 playback speed. Looked to me like your eye movements were pretty minimal with no backtracking. Pretty cool to be able to see that via the eye tracking technology. What an amazing training aide for riders. I still think gamifying it could be really cool. Deduct points for backtracking. No points for eyes on near-focus for too long.