Powering Fan Engagement for Racing Events with Amazon Location Service

For race organizers and sports teams, providing near real-time participant tracking across vast distances has traditionally required extensive physical infrastructure. With Amazon Location Service, you can now deliver immersive fan experiences by tracking athletes from motorsports to marathons at scale in the cloud.

Whether it’s motorsports, cycling, running, or sailing, knowing participants’ locations in near real-time adds an exciting dimension for both fans and teams. While traditional sensor-based tracking works well within venues, scaling these solutions across events spanning tens or hundreds of miles presents significant challenges. Race organizers using RFID timing systems can only provide readings at limited checkpoints, and the required infrastructure makes scaling cost-prohibitive.

Amazon Location Service transforms this experience by enabling the tracking and sharing of participant positions every 30 seconds. With built-in geofences and places functionality, organizers can also enable checkpoint alerts and amenity mapping without extensive physical infrastructure. This cloud-based approach opens new possibilities for fan engagement and operational efficiency across vast distances.

We’ll explore three Amazon Location Service use cases that enhance large-scale sporting events for both participants and spectators.

Use-case Solutions

Use-case #1 – Race Participant Mapping

One exciting aspect of attending races is following the progress of the race and, in most cases, tracking your favorite athlete and/or team’s progress. Amazon Location Service makes it straightforward for event organizers and development teams to provide up-to-date positions and progress of each participant’s location in near real-time on a map.

One architecture that you can leverage in order to implement race participant tracking is by using services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT Core, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS AppSync, and Amazon Location Service. These services will help display and track a participant’s position on a map in near real-time.

The key components of this system are:

• Tracking Participants’ Locations: Each participant is equipped with a location-enabled device, whether it’s a dedicated IoT tracker or their smartphone. These devices regularly send their GPS coordinates to AWS IoT Core. An IoT Core rule triggers an AWS Lambda function to both provide the location data to Amazon Location Service and the AWS AppSync GraphQL API, which stores the data in the DynamoDB table.
• Displaying Positions on a Map: The web and mobile applications leverage the Amazon Location Service mapping capabilities to display the participant’s positions in near real-time. The applications make GraphQL queries to the AWS AppSync API to retrieve the latest locations, and then use the Amazon Location Service SDK to render the map and plot the participants positions.
• Near Real-Time Updates: To ensure the map display is always up-to-date, the application can subscribe to GraphQL mutations that are triggered whenever a participant’s location is updated. This allows new positional data to be pushed to spectators without the need for polling from the client app.
• Customizable Mapping: Amazon Location Service provides a wide range of customization options for the map display, from the base map style to the icons and markers used to represent the runners. This allows you to customize the user experience for your participants and spectators.

Use-case #2 – Geofences – Race Progress and Location Alerts

Amazon Location Service Geofences allow you to define virtual boundaries around specific geographic areas, enabling alerts when tracked devices enter or exit those areas. Within our large-scale race use case, we can use this functionality to support triggering notifications for spectators as participants they are monitoring reach checkpoints throughout the race.

Figure 2: Architecture Diagram for Geofence Based Alerts.

The key components of this use case are:

• IoT Core for collecting positional data from numerous participants and tracking devices.
• IoT Core Rules for calling AWS Lambda when positional data is passed in.
• AWS Lambda to pass the positional data in to Amazon Location Service.
• Amazon Location Service to ingest tracking data and trigger events when ingested tracking data is within predefined geofenced locations.
• Amazon EventBridge allows us to route our geofence event to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).
• Amazon SNS sends the notification to the Spectator Mobile App.

Use-case #3 – Places – Mapping Spectator and Participant Amenities

Figure 3: Architecture Diagram of Request Flow for Amenity Locations and Maps from Amazon Location Service.

Amazon Location Service Places allow us to define the position of custom locations. This allows us to support the mapping of race specific locations for participants and spectators. Granting the ability for mapping of medical tents and water stations for participants, and amenities like concession stands and restrooms for spectators.

In this use-case solution we have our Spectator Mobile App consume Location Service Places and Location Service Maps from Amazon Location Service through an Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.

Considerations

When implementing Amazon Location Service for race events, keep in mind two key timing considerations.

First, Amazon Location Service provides 30-second tracking intervals, which facilitate excellent spectator experiences, but isn’t suitable for precise finish-line timing. For official race timing and results, complement Location Service with traditional RFID systems that measure down to fractions of a second.

Second, size your geofences appropriately for the 30-second tracking interval. A participant moving at race speeds could pass through too small of a geofence between position updates, thereby preventing entrance and exit event triggers. Calculate your geofence dimensions based on maximum expected participant speeds to ensure reliable checkpoint detection. For example, a runner moving at a five-minute mile pace covers about 161 meters between position updates, so checkpoint geofences should span at least this distance.

Conclusion

We explored how Amazon Location Service can enable large-scale races with functionality for both participants and spectators. By leveraging the cloud-based capabilities of Amazon Location Service, event organizers can provide an enhanced experience for everyone involved, from near real-time participant tracking to customized mapping and location-based alerts.

Use Amazon Location Service to provide a better race experience today.

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Further Reading

Hands-on Workshops

• Getting Started with Amazon Location Service – This workshop guides you through the fundamentals of Amazon Location Service, helping you understand core concepts and basic implementation patterns.
• How to Build a Pet Tracker Application – Learn to build an end-to-end asset tracking solution using Amazon Location Service through this comprehensive workshop that covers patterns similar to our race tracking use cases.

Technical Documentation

• Tutorial: Use AWS Lambda with MQTT – A step by step guide to integrating AWS Lambda with MQTT.

Related Resources

• Watch the AWS re:Invent 2022 session: How Amazon Location Service enabled London Marathon runner tracking (FWM201) to see a real-world implementation of race tracking at scale.