VR’s ability to instantly embody a person in simulated space turns out to be an incredible match for fitness. The idea that you can forget the pressure of the physical world and get into the rhythmic flow of a workout is one of the ways VR is transforming lives all over the world.
I captured some of those stories in a recent writeup about Supernatural’s return to independence, but now I’ve had the CEO of FitXR Sam Cole on the Good VR Podcast to discuss their 10-year story building active fitness applications for VR. If there are any FitXR fans reading this, or listening to the podcast, feel free to send an email to editor@goodvirtualreality.com to tell me about how the service has affected your life for potential coverage in a future article. Please include how you want to be identified in the article and as many details as you can about your fitness journey.
“Something like only 4% of Americans have a gym membership and actively use that gym membership. It just shows you that the vast majority of the population aren’t engaging regularly with exercise,” Cole says on the podcast. “The fitness industry looks at people who haven’t formed a habit with exercise — they won’t ever publicly say this — but they’ll generally feel like it’s a problem with the customer. And those customers are fickle and can’t form a habit and therefore [are] a low value to try and serve. But the opposite is true. It’s a problem with the product. The more that you’re able to build a product to serve this audience, the more that you’re able to serve a truly mass market audience.”
The conversation with Cole goes full circle from their initial interest in building for an augmented reality headset from Magic Leap to being encouraged to build for VR headsets and finally to the coming wave of glasses-sized VR eyewear that can transform people’s perception about what the devices are for.
“We will have headsets soon that feel a lot more like glasses in terms of form factor. That’s going to be really significant for overall adoption … we’ve done a bunch of things with Meta over the years where we’ve tried to sell headsets to our target demographic and really market headsets as pieces of fitness equipment rather than a gaming console. When we talk to customers in that kind of sales process, you really understand their skepticism,” Cole said. “Let’s just zero in on the Quest, for example, when they look at that device, they think gaming console for kids. They can’t envision themselves wearing that. For us it’s a piece of fitness equipment. They can’t see themselves wearing that to do fitness, but they also can’t see themselves wearing that to watch a movie. They can’t see themselves to do that to take a video call, for example. When you put the Quest 3 on them, none of them go, yeah, I mean it’s great, but if it was just a little bit less heavy, I would buy it. It’s all of this preconceived ideas about what it is and isn’t going to be. So I think it’s so much tied to how the device looks in marketing materials and therefore that driving the adoption … more people need to look at the device and answer yes to the question of ‘can I see myself wearing that?’ Even if wearing that only means wearing it in my own home. I’m very supportive of the approach the hardware manufacturers take here trying to drive more use cases of people wearing the devices out in public as well, watching movies on a plane or on a train … But also I get it from a productivity use case as well, whereas if you walked around more cafes, right, and you saw people working with these headsets on, I think that that would be beneficial as well. Those are all secondary to this fundamental question of can I see myself wearing that device? The new devices that are coming, the answer to that is gonna be yes for a lot more people than it has been for the historical devices.”
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