Welcome to this week's Sunday Briefing. In this edition:
Helcim powers payment processing for Harvest
Futurpreneur applications surge 50 per cent nationwide
An Alberta farmer is building renewable energy for a future AI data centre
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A UCalgary student solved rock climbing navigation with a 3D app
Photo: Unsplash
A University of Calgary master's student has turned a personal frustration with rock climbing navigation into a research project that won a best paper award at the world's top human-computer interaction conference.
Ben Pearman, a computer science student and avid climber, built ThreeTopo after finding that existing navigation tools — typically written descriptions or hand-drawn diagrams — left climbers prone to getting off route. Using a drone, Pearman created a 3D digital twin of Red Shirt, a 240-metre climb on Mount Yamnuska, what the University of Calgary describes as the crown jewel of climbing in the Canadian Rockies.
"I thought there had to be a better way of doing this than reading a three-sentence description from 30 years ago," Pearman said.
Working with seven experienced climbers, Pearman designed the app to be fully usable one-handed, with spatial annotations pointing out key features on the wall and human-scale avatars to help climbers gauge scale. After a public deployment, seven users who downloaded the app went on to climb Red Shirt — none got lost or went off route.
The project was presented at ACM CHI in Barcelona in April 2026, where it received a best paper award. It was developed through UCalgary's Data Experience Lab, led by associate professor Wesley Willett.
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🤝 Funding, Deals, and Partnerships
Helcim to power payment processing for growth harvest platform. The partnership brings Helcim’s payment processing capabilities into Harvest’s platform, according to a statement from the firms. Calgary.Tech
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📰 Need To Know
Futurpreneur applications surge as more youth explore entrepreneurship. National non-profit saw application rise 50 percent nationwide and 65 percent in Alberta in latest fiscal quarter. Betakit
Alberta farmer turns bad weather into a clean power play. A farmer-led group cleared a key hurdle last month for an all-in-one renewable energy project to power a future AI data centre in southern Alberta. Now the hard work begins. The National Observer