What is Ski:IQ™?

What is Ski:IQ™?

Ski:IQ™ is a single number that estimates the quality of your ski technique. It's the headline score in Carv.

It's built from four core skill areas:

• Balance: how well you stay centred and stable through the turn

• Edging: how you tip and engage the ski's edge

• Rotary: how you steer and direct the ski

• Pressure: how you load and release the ski through the turn

How Ski:IQ™ works

Carv analyses every turn you make and scores it against a model trained on thousands of hours of skiing, from recreational skiers through to instructors and national team athletes. Those individual skill scores are combined using machine-learned weightings, so the emphasis shifts appropriately with your ability level and the terrain you're on.

Ski:IQ™ runs on a scale up to 200, centred around 100 - so it's distributed like a bell curve, with most skiers clustered near the middle and fewer at either end. A score of 100 puts you right in the middle of the skiing population. As you get better so will your IQ!

Because of that distribution, points get harder to win the further out you go. Most skiers see their biggest jumps early on, then smaller, harder-won gains as they climb - a few points at the top end represents a lot of skiing.

Is Ski:IQ™ the same with and without sensors?

Yes. Carv (app only) and Carv Pro produce the same Ski:IQ™ on the same scale, so you can compare your skiing day to day whichever version you're on.

The Carv 2 sensors sit right at the boot/ski/snow interface, which will always be our most accurate way to measure skiing. Carv (app only) infers the same qualities from how your body moves, using the accelerometer and gyroscope in your phone - taught by years of sessions where skiers wore Carv 2 while carrying a phone. It trades some granularity for radical simplicity, which is why only the detailed turn-by-turn metrics are available in Carv Pro.

While we continue testing the phone-based system, Ski:IQ™ scores recorded without sensors don't appear on the global public leaderboards. They do count on your friend leaderboards.

Pitch and Terrain

Ski:IQ™ accounts for what you're skiing. A clean turn on a steep, chopped-up red is a different achievement to a clean turn on a groomed blue, and Carv adjusts for pitch and terrain so your score reflects the skiing rather than the slope you happened to choose.

Carv also recognises how you're skiing - parallel, carving, moguls, short turns or powder - and coaches accordingly.