Heaps: smart climbing wall

Abstract

Ever since its birth, the human race has faced mountains as an obstacle and a challenge. There is no doubt that it was long ago that humans started climbing as a necessity, but it was not until much later (the 19th century) that we started climbing for pleasure and turned it into a sport. Throughout the years, the growth and progress of climbing has been closely tied to engineering and creativity. It is only through these two tools that we have been able to design new disciplines and gear. A clear example of this is the evolution of the anchoring systems: in the early times, climbers had to hammer a piece of steel into the mountain cracks while nowadays they use easily removable camming devices that can hold the weight of a cargo van. Since I am both an engineer and a climber myself, one can say that I was bound to end up trying to contribute to the aforementioned growth with my small grain of sand. The idea that is developed in this project has its roots in a hard training session at the climbing gym. After having climbed the same wall (i.e. the same routes) over and over for an afternoon, some fellow climbers and I had an educated discussion about the tediousness and repetitiveness of climbing walls. It was then that I took it upon myself to devise a system that could provide a breathtakingly vast number of possible routes in a single climbing wall. This project presents HEAPS, a new design for indoor climbing gyms. Instead of having fixed holds (which entail only one possible route), HEAPS replaces each hold for a modular unit that can offer four different hold possibilities (one for each side of the modular unit) thus escalating the number of possible routes.