New cellular phone video game utilizes 37 years of Hawaiian wave data allowing Mark Zuckerberg, Jonah Hill et. al. to surf the 2004 Eddie, 2017 Pipe Masters and more!

For the win.

I’m in Italy, as you may know, carving down the Dolomites, having espresso mid-mountain etc. and it is all so wonderful but don’t worry, I’ll describe fully later and soon. In the meantime, there is a new application for iOS called “Surf” that allows players to ride as a dog on a surfboard hopping over sharks.

Fantastical? Magically no, as the waves themselves happened in real life.

The creator, Andy Bergmann, actually used National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to plug 37 years of real Hawaiian swell into the game, each of the 300 levels represent a condensed month of time starting in 1984. According to Fast Company, “To squeeze all this ocean data into the game, Bergmann tweaked his own algorithm hundreds of times in order to edit down tremendous amounts of real wave data into the shorter, surfable waves in the app. The notable nuance about these video game waves, however, is that they’re actually a wave chart . . . and wave charts correspond with how waves actually look.”

Bergmann says, “Oceanic movement is one of the most clear visualizations of math in the natural world. In cross-section, waves are essentially a moving line graph. You’ll encounter [a] surf in February 2016 so large it will actually carry you off the screen. Search the web, and you’ll find photos of those waves in real life, and read about ‘The Eddie,’ a surfing competition that occurs spontaneously only when the waves become gargantuan.”

All to say, Mark Zuckerberg, Jonah Hill and other surf-adjacent dreamers can now take that shark jumping dog and smash John John Florence at the aforementioned Eddie in 2016 or Bruce Irons in 2004 or even John John Florence again at the 2017 Pipe Masters.

All for only $2.

Cheaper than an electric foil.