Notable - Peloton Lanebreak & Oculus Move's Health integration
Alternative reality . . . with our real bodies
Hello!
I recently came back from Portugal. It was our first international travel ever with kids, and it went great. It was fun, humbling, and educational. Tremendous.
Next week I will be sending the updated autonomous piece as some exciting things happened while I was gone that I now want to incorporate. So this edition instead will be back in the “Notable” category where I comment on some interesting news I saw.
The unifying theme is augmented reality experiences that are connected to health. Digital experiences affecting your real body.
Peloton Lanebreak
Context: Peloton introduced a new mode that is a game, not instructor-led.
In my opinion, Peloton, Headspace, and Pokemon Go were some of the first mainstream use cases of “Augmented Reality”. You were doing traditional, analog behaviors with new digital guidance. In Headspace’s case it was guided mediation. In Peloton’s case it was guided fitness (and meditation now too). And in Pokemon’s case, it was collection.
Now Peloton has opened up Lanebreak which goes from instructor-guided to game-guided. It was a cool visual experience! There was very clear feedback and there were mechanics to help you sprint, change your resistance, and keep a specific tempo. They had a great tutorial to make sure people knew how it worked, as well as how to do it safely without hurting themselves. I recommend trying it out.
There’s two interesting business implications of this too:
These Lanebreak workouts are almost certainly easier and cheaper to produce than Peloton’s highly-produced instructor-led workouts.
This could be a case study and initial test for Peloton-as-a-platform. Can you build other awesome experiences using the big, immersive screen and the hardware interface?
Put together, Peloton may make higher-margin revenue here soon. That’s very valuable considering Peloton’s well reported current business challenges. However, if customers only use the bike for these non-instructor workouts, it could mean they aren’t willing to pay for the $40/month subscription anymore. Which could in turn affect the strongest part of Peloton’s business: phenomenal revenue retention and great customer loyalty.
Quest connects to Apple Health
Context: Oculus’s activity-tracking feature, Oculus Move, can now record into Apple Health.
This is an impressively humble move by Oculus (Meta). Apple has nearly 100X more active devices than Oculus. It also definitely has a better privacy reputation, which is key with health data. This integration allows Oculus to tap into that bigger audience and strengthen the emergent fitness value prop of the Oculus.
Oculus has bought two companies with fitness titles that have been VR hits: Supernatural and Beat Saber. Mark Zuckerberg even talked about the Quest 2’s fitness use case in his keynote at the last connect conference.
“It’s kind of like a Peloton, but instead of your bike you just have your VR headset and with it, you can do anything from boxing lessons to sword-fighting to even dancing.”
The integration enables Apple users to see their Oculus Move data as part of the general Health activity data set. In turn, when a user is wanting to get some more exercise, the attraction of the Quest 2 is reinforced. That makes the Quest 2 more engaging, which is key to eventually making VR a must-have experience.