codefoster

My role at Microsoft is that of an evangelist, and that implies that we speak broadly to audiences about technology. Recently, however, my team is working one-on-one with organizations on exciting new Microsoft technologies - making sure they’re exactly what developers need.

One of the projects I’ve been working on recently is called Regatta championed by Baiyin Zhou (@baiyinvc) from Boston.

This entire idea is super fun. Imagine exercising on a rowing machine in a studio in a group session. Now imagine a visual on the wall depicting your rowing machine and those of the other session participants as real boats. As you heave and ho, you see your little boat moving across the screen.

There are just so many awesome scenarios that are possible at this point.

The visual of the boats alone is encouragement for you to work harder to compete against others in the class. But that’s pretty obvious isn’t it. What about the less obvious scenarios? What about being able to add in a phantom boat that represents the group’s average from yesterday’s workout? Now you’re not competing against your fellow rowers - you’re competing with them. You have to beat that phantom boat!

As soon as things in the real world - like our efforts to stay in shape - are digitized and turned into data, we get to do things like capture our progress, integrate with other fitness tracker systems, or even do data analysis to determine some deep learning from it.

This is the type of concept where digital systems really have an opportunity to affect our lives for the better. I keep saying that technology is not so interesting unless it improves our lives. For being such a technophile, I’m actually quite the skeptic, because all too often technology just gets in the way.

The Regatta Project envisions a future with a whole lot of rowing machines deployed with smart devices (the Raspberry Pi Zero at this point) attached to them, and assuring good communication with all of these devices is a great job for Azure IoT Hub.

Go check out the details of the [Regatta](https://microsoft.github.io/techcasestudies/iot/2016/12/10/regatta.html) project and let me know what you think with a comment below.