Many homebound consumers have turned to virtual recreations of real-life offices or events to break up the monotony of the pandemic. But while these virtual spaces accurately represent the socialization of the physical world, they lack the physical movement inherent to their real-life counterparts. After all, at-home workers don’t have to commute, and dancing at a digital concert is largely a matter of nodding and waving one’s hands.

Even full-VR experiences, with headsets and hand controllers, are unlikely to make users break a sweat. While VRChat’s AT&T Station is immersive in many ways, it requires players to use a joystick, rather than their own feet, to navigate the experience.

“It’s a constant struggle — we want our kids to be outside, in the backyard running around,” said Josh Neuman, president of the metaverse development studio MELON. “We’re battling that, but at the same time, I think technology and social community are going to drive interest back into exciting things that you can do physically.” Neuman cited the popular Pokémon GO as a prominent example: “It really did get kids out walking.”

Capti’s main product, launched today, is an at-home version of the Expresso Bike, a gamified fitness bike that has been present in gyms for over a decade. Capti is not the first company to bring cycling into virtual space, and certainly not the first to invest in the remote fitness space during the pandemic: at-home fitness companies such as Mirror and Peloton have experienced rapid growth over the past 18 months. Some observers have already described Zwift, a massively multiplayer cycling and running program, as a metaverse platform. Capti CEO Jeff Veldhuizen worked at Zwift from 2018 to 2020. “That’s where I developed more of my thesis around fitness as a game,” Veldhuizen said.

What sets Capti apart from its competitors is its potential for interoperability — that is, the ability to transfer users’ assets and identities across multiple platforms. Zwift is a custom program largely marketed toward dedicated cyclists; on the other hand, Capti’s cycling platform was built in Unreal Engine, the same engine developed by Epic Games and used to design titles such as Fortnite. This gamification, and the slew of similarities between Capti and popular video games, makes it more of a family product than other at-home fitness bikes.

“Most fitness platforms, whether it be a Peloton, or a Zwift, or anyone else, it’s a closed platform,” Veldhuizen said. “But we’ve chosen to be an open platform because we want to bring creators and developers into fitness, and we want to be able to give them our SDK [software development kit] and come up with stuff …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron