High-intensity exercises like the virtual reality (VR) fitness app from FitXR have grown in popularity, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Developing games suitable for these devices requires optimal ergonomics, interoperability and ecosystems to embrace a massive community of followers.
The London, England-based company remained a longtime developer on the Meta Quest 2, but recently moved its solution to the Pico 4. This crossover aims to expand its die-hard fitness fan base while also leveraging ByteDance’s premium consumer headset specs.
XR interview today Phil Baker, Vice President of Engineering, FitXRto discuss how to choose the right VR headset for its gaming platform.
XR Today: What is FitXR, and what are its benefits for commercial and corporate end users?
Phil Baker: FitXR is the leading VR fitness app on the Meta Quest, and we’ve now launched it on PICO. Through five immersive studios, FitXR provides its community with a variety of next-generation, immersive workouts that range in intensity, duration, and skill – with the common ground of movement and fun.
We’re a constantly evolving service, adding new features and improvements to your workout experience every month. Along with these periodic improvements to the core product, we’re committed to keeping your workout feeling exciting and fresh, and to that end, new chapters are released every week.
Because we’re committed to putting fitness goals within everyone’s reach, FitXR has recently integrated with the big names in fitness tech like Strava, and through this, members can access a more comprehensive snapshot of their fitness journey through shared data.
This stands in line with our belief that a personal exercise regimen is key to falling in love with fitness, thus, along with the huge range of individual classes on offer, we have recently expanded the number of ways a member can choose to participate by issuing longer format, multisession training plans. Professional coaches train players through a series of classes to improve their performance and technique.
XR Today: Can you explain why so many companies are expanding into the Pico lineup of headphones? What are the benefits of using their machines and build?
Phil BakerExpanding to a different headset: For a developer, some of the primary considerations are the feasibility and cost of creating a product, with porting an existing product often the most attractive solution. big Application library is in Quest 2, which is a possibility.
Let’s compare the Pico 4 and Quest 2 from a design perspective. Because they have consistent input and visualization capabilities, these devices translate to very little effort required to rework an existing product, which means that future updates and changes to product features will likely apply to both.
Technically speaking, the Pico 4 has it quite a bit Better accuracy from Quest 2, but otherwise closely comparable in terms of hardware capabilities and platform functionality. And the additional 2GB of RAM as overhead space on the Pico 4 further reduces the risk of porting an existing application.
So it’s precisely this parity that makes expanding from Quest 2 to Pico 4 an attractive prospect – it involves a relatively low-performance risk and upscaling effort that nonetheless brings a host of user- and partner-related opportunities.
Of course, one of those gains is broadening your potential consumer base, and there are some notable differences in form factor, weight, balance, and fit. These features set Pico apart—and are particularly attractive to users looking for a fitness experience—and should help drive that expansion, making this an enticing prospect.
Looking beyond the consumer market, Beko has it announce that their Pico 4 headphones will soon have PUI-powered business applications, which will allow companies to customize configurations through a visual interface and API.
This mobile device management (MDM) offering, with the latest hardware, can allow organizations to be the architects of how they integrate virtual reality into areas such as employee training, education, and in-house communication. This market is likely to expand over time.
XR Today: Do you think motivating the app developer community is a sustainable long-term benefit for XR?
Phil BakerApplication developers Create experiences Because XR is at the heart of what makes devices valuable to consumers and defines reasons for use. Ensuring that there are long-term sustainable benefits for application developers is the primary means for the growth of the XR ecosystems.
For the XR, as with any new and innovative computing device such as a mobile phone, while the features and functionality of the device are valuable, it is the applications on those computing devices that create true value, habits, and use for the consumer.
Incentives can provide a broader set of applications more quickly, with greater variety, experimentation, and ultimately utility—and thus can pave the way for critical user expansion.
There is always a disruptive benefit to nurturing innovation, and incentives will always have a role to play there. However, using incentives to drive user scale in this very moment, over time, will ultimately be a long-term benefit for XR.
XR Today: How has FitXR stayed competitive against other apps like Supernatural and Liteboxer? Can you explain the use of FitXR’s UI, development and deployment features?
Phil Baker: FitXR has stayed competitive with its strong beat on the landscape. It currently has the largest VR fitness offering across the industry, with a solid selection of classes for any user, at any level, and at any time period.
However, the real key to success is listening to our users and delivering what they really want. We do this by closely connecting our fitness experts with our users.
First, we empower our experts to listen and learn. We do this by dedicating our efforts to building and maintaining an ongoing dialogue with our community. We also invest heavily in data and analytics to see what might work for our users and to measure results. In a space like VR, which is constantly evolving, there’s always something new to add to the product, but you have to think carefully about what’s right.
Second, we strive to create the best and most authentic fitness experience where trainers can use their skills as experts to achieve actual fitness results in the most engaging and entertaining way possible.
In practical terms, this means dedicating efforts to building first-class in-house content creation tools, content management systems, and editors that deliver as much creative expression as possible to our experts. We want to enable them to build a progression experience for them, where the user feels close to the coaches as people.
Finally, we realize that it means nothing if we do not provide a robust and dynamic service so that, across our service, our coaches are constantly available to our users on demand. We pay close attention to everything from software quality approaches to minimizing development complexities such as multi-platform abstraction, and we constantly iterate on the speed of the development process.
However, I also think this increased a race It will ultimately be a positive thing for the broader ecosystem. Of course, my goal is always to stay ahead of the competition, but I also strive to learn from what is out there to help improve our product and landscape.
XR Today: What do you think is important to the development of the XR user community? How can companies like yours increase adoption rates for VR headset use?
Phil Baker: If we are to advance the XR user community, we must push forward the mission of accessibility. This will remind users that with a headset, they can exercise from anywhere, anytime, and for as long as they want. Physical exercise is traditionally associated with going to the gym and, sometimes, engaging in regular exercise around other people you’ve never met.
With a virtual reality headset, these fears and intimidations are erased. How and when you choose to break a sweat is on your terms. Another vital aspect of the XR – arguably the most important – is the ability to escape from reality.
As seen with Latest Apple teasersVirtual reality headsets are evolving. The essence of any VR headset is the ability to step into another world and enhance the activities you enjoy every day, such as fitness, watching TV, or streaming your favorite movies.
FitXR can increase headphone adoption by showing the public just how versatile they are, even outside the fitness world. At FitXR, we have avid gamers who use FitXR as their primary way of working out, some are fitness enthusiasts looking for a new way to exercise and others who have never entered the world of fitness or gaming.
When we were just starting out, we’d have pairs sharing headphones, one using them for fitness and the other using them as a vessel for a game. Headphones have more than one use, and apps like FitXR show how these headphones are a great tool for breaking a sweat but also offer so much more, before or after your workouts.