Is this the future of interactive piste maps?

When booking a ski holiday you always look at the piste map before making that final desicion (well I do anyway). The search more often than not returns a low quality image or an interactive version so complicated you regret pressing the view here button. That all changed when looking at the Arlberg ski area in Austria.

First I stumbled across the superb website http://www.bergfex.com/. Covering the majority of resorts within Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, you select your resort by selecting the country then the resort using the map. A google map application then appears at the top of the page centred on the resort displaying accommodation available in the restort. What caught my eye was the link to an 3D interactive piste map. The mapping application has been created by gpixs360< and uses the Google Earth API. The user can do the usual pan and zoom but also toogle on/off the ski runs and view video footage of the someone skiing a selected run.

Over the past two or three years it has been good to see many of the ski domains creating interactive maps for their websites. They can offer so much more than a 2D image and I think gpixs360 have got it right with this attempt at bringing online piste maps to life.