Comment by ryandamm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandamm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's been done before, a few times:

https://expresso.com/ https://www.virzoom.com/

Expresso is more commercially-oriented, but iirc they lost high eight figures starting back in the 2000s. Virzoom only burned something like seven figures so far, working against the added drag of VR adoption.

And then there's Zwift (https://www.zwift.com/), which doesn't carry the hardware costs and was recently valued at ~$1 bn+.

If I'm playing armchair CEO, it seems like you do better off by leveraging the existing hardware ecosystem and just building a content / network play. Better to gift Apple / Google 30% than try to build, launch, and support hardware.

Also, it's really hard to get enough users to support a fun enough game library; the overhead of custom content development is way, way too high unless you've got, I dunno, tens of millions of users? Everyone's thinking of Peloton, but they adopted the highly successful spin class model to the home. The change in behavior was staying home rather than going to the gym, not starting exercise instead of playing video games. And full disclosure, yes: I was skeptical of Peloton before they launched, too.

Pretty fair take. I think their marketing line of "It's more fun than Fortnite!" is like.. way off the mark. There's no overlap of the the Venn diagram of Fornite players and the market for this bike.

https://expresso.com - Virtual biking

https://www.virzoom.com - VR biking

https://www.zwift.com - Interactive screen for real bike

Playpulse - Exercise while gaming? A new twist for me.

Missed the Nintendo Ring Fit Adventure, did you? I wish I could call it insight, but it was just blind luck and timing that I got a Switch and Ring Fit before Covid hit. I have to say, for something that I thought would a lockdown gadget purchase I'd regret later, I'm still using it. And I don't need my exercise gamified, I've been a distance runner since before the first Sony Walkman. But it is a surprising amount of fun, and impressively done with a variety of options. And, runner or couch potato, it can be a decent workout. The Apple Watch says it burns a reasonable amount of calories for time spent.

But anyway, back to the point, Ring Fit is just the Switch version of Wii Fit (for loose definitions of...), so it's not a new thing.

> Playpulse - Exercise while gaming? A new twist for me.

Do you have an Oculus or Vive? There's like a zillion "exercise while gaming" apps/games.

Those three are "bike simulators". The thing about a device that simulates being on a bike, cycling through the outdoors, is that anyone who remotely has any interest in that can buy a bike and go cycling through the outdoors.

If playpulse does this right, then the goal is to engage the mind in playing games, and have the mind engage the body in achieving results. Disclosure: I was involved with the Exertris bike [1].

A quarterback's mind isn't thinking about doing a tricep extension, they are thinking about throwing the ball to a receiver. A receiver isn't thinking about doing a 100 yard sprint, they are thinking about avoiding getting tackled and scoring. Likewise, when we engage the mind in games where pedaling affects the game, e.g you go faster, or your weapons charge faster, then people workout harder and longer because their brain is playing the game, not thinking about pushing pedals.

Even Peloton is just being shouted at to push pedals harder: keeping the mind utterly aware of doing the thing that sucks. Playpulse is having someone capture your flag, and you chasing after them.

The market is people who know they should do cardio, but hate it. I was actually talking about this very subject with my Physio today, saying how I wished I had one of our old bikes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exertris

Reply on news.ycombinator.com