A game-changing experience for everyone on board, built on the world’s best marine guidance platform. That’s the promise of ‘BoatingOS’, a major new initiative by Irish marine technology company, Raceix, in association with BENETEAU, their global development partner.
BoatingOS is an entirely new operating system which will power the next generation of chart-plotters – much like how Android works for smartphones. It’s an always-connected platform, delivering data to the helm in a usable, understandable and contextually-aware way, while also unlocking millions of completely new data points which will enrich the boating experience on board. Those behind the initiative believe that current solutions can be difficult to understand, may contain information that is often out of date, and do little to encourage and support fresh marine adventures.
Vicki O’Donnell, head of marine data, explains further “Current marine-mapping is often based on very old data, in fact only 15% of the Earth’s oceans are mapped and some of this data is over 50 years old. Mapping the ocean is expensive and the data that we all use on our chart-plotters can actually represent less than 20% of the actual global data collected. during surveys from governmental bodies right across the world. The additional data, which we can now unlock through BoatingOS, will be a gamechanger for pleasure boaters. For example, crowd-sourced bathymetry has been the ‘Holy Grail’ in hydrographic offices across the world for over a decade. Those that have looked at what we’re doing believe that we will finally unlock the enormous potential of leisure craft fleets around the world by delivering the most up-to-data mapping, to ensure safety at sea.”
