NSAA Press Release
After an entire ski season of beta testing at Loon Mountain, NH during the frigid and snowy winter of 2014, the Mountain Pass beta unit was shown publically at the NSAA convention in Savannah, GA for the first time.
Show attendees got to see how the system can detect ticket transfer through its video software biometric detection. The first time the skier comes through Mountain Pass, the system videos the motion and using its image recognition software detects the location of major body joints. It then stores the distances between jonts in a database, linking it to the RFID ticket ID. The next time the ticket ID is detected, the system compares the biometrics stored in its database to the skier going through Mountain Pass. If the biometrics match, a green GO light turns on and the gate opens. If they do not, a red STOP light turns on and the gate remains closed.
The Mountain Pass system used UHF RFID inlays, that are different than other gates on the market, including Skidata and Axes. These systems use HF (high frequecy) RFID that has a limited range of less than 3 feet and ticket prices that can be as high as $2 each. Mountain Pass uses UHF (ultra high frequency) RFID with a range of close to 20 feet and ticket prices of only 15 cents more than paper tickets, allowing for disposable daily tickets.
Other features of Mountain Pass are ease of setup and movement. The ski resort just needs to provide AC power and a wifi connection. Mountain Pass will self configure and start checking tickets right from turn on. To move to another lift, the roof gets lowered and the ramps get flipped up. The structure is now standing on its ski-like base, making it easy to maually push it or to attach it to a snowmobile and pull it to its new location.
Compatibility with existing resort management system is very straight forward. Mountain Pass Systems provide a LINC box that the tickets gets dipped into once the bar code is printed on the ticket. The LINC box encodes the bar code data into the RFID data field. When the tickets is detected in Mountain Pass, the bar code is extracted from the RFID and sent directly to the RMS. To the RMS, Mountain Pass is a hand held bar code scanner. Mountian Pass waits for the RMS to send a ticket valid response. With that and a biometric confirmation, the green GO light turns on and the gate opens.
Hal Charych, CEO (right) and Mike O’Haire, VP of Engineering (left)