Surfing is the latest sport to undergo a technological transformation.

The World Surf League has partnered with Amazon Web Services Inc. and AllCloud Inc. to create wearables for surfers. These watches serve two purposes: they give athletes real-time scoring information, and they communicate surfing competition data to fans and broadcasters.

“We started collecting all the data we could off the watches,” said Robert Occhialini (pictured, center), chief technology officer of the World Surf League. “Then through our partnership with AllCloud and AWS, [we] went through the process of building a pipeline that processes all of that data, correlates that data with our scoring and judging information and really creates a finished product data that we can show to athletes, to fans.”

Occhialini, Gabriel Romero (right), chief marketing officer of AllCloud, and Julia Chen (left), vice president of Partner Core at AWS, spoke with John Furrier at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the companies’ collaboration is shaping the surfing world.

Surfing gets nerdy

The new wearables produce a vast amount of data, including miles per hour, distance surfed and heart rates correlated with scores. AllCloud’s team specializes in AI-led professional managed services and as a partner of AWS, it has all the certifications and institutional knowledge needed to take on a project of this size, Romero explained.

“When we first started working with World Surf League, I think the team got really excited,” he said. “We learned very quickly that this is not a data migration project. This is transformational. We used a number of technologies. We built a centralized analytics layer on Redshift … and then on Bedrock we built a solution that is integrated with the structured data on Redshift.”

That integration enables broadcasters to query the data instantaneously and use the answers to form a narrative to the end viewer. The project’s focus is on athlete performance, with surfers able to use real-time scoring data to inform their decisions and fan engagement, which has suffered from surfing’s time delays.

“The ocean’s the limit,” Chen said. “Take this sport that historically has been … harder to access from a fan perspective and now [the collaboration]’s changing the game. You can view it and see all the stats and get excited and really study it like you would some of these other sports that people watch in a stadium.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

Photo: SiliconANGLE