Using Google Cloud AI to measure the physics of U.S. freestyle snowboarding and skiing

Nearly every snowboard trick carries a number. A 1080 means three full rotations. A 1440 means four. The convention is simple: add up every rotation around every axis and count in 180° increments. For decades it's served as the sport's universal shorthand for difficulty. Judges, coaches, and athletes all speak this language fluently.

It's also, by necessity, an over-approximation. Without sensors on the athlete's body, there was never a way to measure what happens mid-flight. The trick name counts planned rotations and assigns each one a full 360°. That was the best available approach — until now.

Working with U.S. Ski & Snowboard ahead of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, we built an AI tool on Google Cloud that extracts full 3D biomechanical data from ordinary video. Using Gemini and frontier computer vision research from Google DeepMind, it turns any camera into a motion-capture ...