Obstacle courses of the type shown in U.S. Pat. No. 8,574,085 are currently in use for teaching participants about the fragile nature of real cave environments. Users of the current systems include search and rescue personnel, caving enthusiasts, and children and adults from the general public. When these users travel through the obstacle courses, they encounter artificial cave formations, also known as speleothems. When a user touches or otherwise inappropriately interacts with a speleothem, the user is considered to have “damaged” that speleothem. The “damaging” interaction between the user and the speleothem is detected by electronic sensors. These sensors may convey “damage” information to a system that displays maps showing all of the “damages” that have occurred, along with aggregate data such as (1) the total number of “damages” that have occurred in the current session and (2) the elapsed time of the current session. U.S. Pat. No. 8,574,085 is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
Although the current obstacle courses have been very successful, there are a number of respects in which the current systems might be improved. For example, users may enter the existing obstacle courses singly or in groups, but in the courses currently in use there is no provision for determining which user within a group “damaged” a given formation. Further, there are no provisions for determining the location of each user within the course, or the progress of each user through the course. Additionally, in the systems currently in use, the users wear protective helmets equipped with electric lights, and there is no provision in the existing courses for the lights to be turned on and off automatically when the users enter and exit the course. There is also no provision for automatically detecting whether each user is wearing the proper equipment (including the helmet with light), and whether that equipment is functioning properly. Because of the above-described aspects of the existing courses, and because of other possible considerations not stated, there is room for improvement to the systems currently in use in the areas of user identification and tracking.