Queenstown, NZ

The Rydges is where we stayed the first few nights in Queenstown before taking a few days to drive around the southern part of New Zealand's south island. This is also the hotel where the Asian Conference on Computer Vision was held, where I presented a paper at one of its workshops (on gaze sensing). Although eye tracking depends on computer vision techniques, this workshop was on a slightly different topic, more on eye detection and estimation of the direction of gaze rather than on eye tracking per se. Think of surveillance video, now try to estimate what people in the video are looking at, that's what the workshop's main theme was on. The paper I presented was on an automatic means of distinguishing eye movement patterns made when watching video. The tie-in to computer vision is that we compared eye movements made by humans with those predicted by a computer vision algorithm.

And then we went boating! I think this may have been the same jet boat ride that I once saw in a Warren Miller ski movie many years ago. In the winter Queenstown is a ski village, not unlike Aspen, Telluride, or Kelowna, for a few examples. I think Warren Miller may have filmed some skiing here and so it's likely that he may have also filmed the Shotover jet ride that we went on. It's only a 20 minute or so ride but it's pretty unique. Because the boat has two jet engines (instead of propellers), it can skim over very shallow parts of the river bed. The drivers are also well experienced and they get damn close to the rocky cliffs of the canyon we were in. They also spin the boat 360 degrees like you see here.

Toward the evening we went on a slightly slower craft, the TSS Earnslaw that you see behind me. This boat was constructed in the same year as the Titanic. This one had clearly survived and still sails today between Queenstown and Walter Peak Station, a sheep ranch (station == ranch in Kiwi). At the station, we enjoyed a traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding dinner. We missed the sit-down (first class) service and so made due with the buffet. I actually skipped the roast beef and went for the lamb shanks. After dinner we saw sheep dog herding and sheep shearing demonstrations. On the way back I took a look down to the Earnslaw's engine room. The vessel is driven by two coal-powered steam engines and functions as it would have done 100 years ago. There were two guys shoveling coal and an engineer who would control engine speed in response to the captain's commands relayed by the old-fashioned rotary dials (e.g., ahead full, full stop, etc.). After a couple of days in Queenstown we would embark on our road trip around the south island...