Heart rate + Other feedback

[nickhod]

Hi,

New Vzfit user here and I have to say I'm impressed. I did a 1 hour workout this evening, which I never manage with Peloton. The time seemed to fly by.
Here's some feedback from a VR exercise newbie, but experienced spin bike and road bike rider.

Heart rate 
Heart rate monitoring is so important for an effective workout. I had my heart rate monitor going on my phone, which I could just about see through the nose gap in the Oculus Go. It would be so much better if it was in game, telling me at a glance what heart rate zone I'm in. A graph would be a bonus, but I realise that depends on rendering overhead.

Battery
When pausing either VZ Fit or Explorer it would be nice to be able to see how much battery I have left, without having to find the Oculus controller and go to the Oculus home

Trainer
Explorer never seems to save the option of having the trainer enabled. Slight annoyance.
Aside from that, I think the trainer should always either be roughly near me or in front of me.
I was using interval mode, and most of the time the trainer seemed to be behind me, so I couldn't even see what interval I was supposed to be doing. If I was paying for a personal trainer in real life and they were behind me, I'd think "what am I paying for"!
I guess I was going too fast on the low effort intervals, but a real trainer would never force someone to expend less effort.
Maybe "trainer keeps up with me" could be an option?

Stereoscopic Bike
On the Go, the bike model is monoscopic by default, I guess for performance / battery drain reasons. It looks so much better in stereoscopic mode. (I have a power bank if it drains the battery too much).
In VZ Fit play it definitely looks monoscopic to me and it breaks immersion a bit. I'd like to be able to make it stereoscopic too, like in Explorer

Bike Computer
A really nice touch would be if the bike had a bike computer on its handlebars showing speed, time, cadence etc.
I found in Explorer I was really getting into a rhythm, like how I ride a road bike. That tends to be leaning forward, head down. Looking up at the HUD (even in low mode) hurt my neck. A virtual bike computer would be perfect.

My Account Interface
I have to be honest, coming from the beautiful Peloton UI, the My Account interface looks a bit "Bootstrap developer prototype" (yeah, I'm a software engineer). You guys would benefit from a Bootstrap Admin template; things would look a lot better, and usability would be improved https://wrapbootstrap.com/

M3U Radio Station Links
I love the internet radio feature, but having a few stations is a bit limiting. I'd like to be able to add m3u urls in the my account interface and be able to click to play those in VZ Fit Play or Explorer. Showing the name of the song being played would be a nice touch too.

Once again, great work though.
Looking forward to messing around with the SDK next!

[nickhod]

One more... 

Explorer Rides via web site
I'd like to be able to view all available Explorer rides in the "My Account" area and be able to search by country, distance etc.
I could then go through and find out rides that interest me before a workout and to my favourites. When it comes time to workout I can just jump on the bike, go to favourite rides and it's there.
Also manage / rename my custom rides.
Generally a whole ride search and management interface on the web side.

[Snowpelt]

Hi,

New Vzfit user here and I have to say I'm impressed. I did a 1 hour workout this evening, which I never manage with Peloton. The time seemed to fly by.
Here's some feedback from a VR exercise newbie, but experienced spin bike and road bike rider.

Heart rate 
Heart rate monitoring is so important for an effective workout. I had my heart rate monitor going on my phone, which I could just about see through the nose gap in the Oculus Go. It would be so much better if it was in game, telling me at a glance what heart rate zone I'm in. A graph would be a bonus, but I realise that depends on rendering overhead.

Battery
When pausing either VZ Fit or Explorer it would be nice to be able to see how much battery I have left, without having to find the Oculus controller and go to the Oculus home

Trainer
Explorer never seems to save the option of having the trainer enabled. Slight annoyance.
Aside from that, I think the trainer should always either be roughly near me or in front of me.
I was using interval mode, and most of the time the trainer seemed to be behind me, so I couldn't even see what interval I was supposed to be doing. If I was paying for a personal trainer in real life and they were behind me, I'd think "what am I paying for"!
I guess I was going too fast on the low effort intervals, but a real trainer would never force someone to expend less effort.
Maybe "trainer keeps up with me" could be an option?

Stereoscopic Bike
On the Go, the bike model is monoscopic by default, I guess for performance / battery drain reasons. It looks so much better in stereoscopic mode. (I have a power bank if it drains the battery too much).
In VZ Fit play it definitely looks monoscopic to me and it breaks immersion a bit. I'd like to be able to make it stereoscopic too, like in Explorer

Bike Computer
A really nice touch would be if the bike had a bike computer on its handlebars showing speed, time, cadence etc.
I found in Explorer I was really getting into a rhythm, like how I ride a road bike. That tends to be leaning forward, head down. Looking up at the HUD (even in low mode) hurt my neck. A virtual bike computer would be perfect.

My Account Interface
I have to be honest, coming from the beautiful Peloton UI, the My Account interface looks a bit "Bootstrap developer prototype" (yeah, I'm a software engineer). You guys would benefit from a Bootstrap Admin template; things would look a lot better, and usability would be improved https://wrapbootstrap.com/

M3U Radio Station Links
I love the internet radio feature, but having a few stations is a bit limiting. I'd like to be able to add m3u urls in the my account interface and be able to click to play those in VZ Fit Play or Explorer. Showing the name of the song being played would be a nice touch too.

Once again, great work though.
Looking forward to messing around with the SDK next!

Hey Nick Welcome to VZFit!


Glad you enjoyed your ride and we appreciate the feedback. I am going to address some of these that I have ready answers to, but not everything. Eric, our CTO, may chime in on a few as well .

Heart Rate:
As someone who wears a whoop band and looks at my heart rate activity after every workout I couldn't agree more.  We are looking at options to bring this in and have it displayed.

Trainer
Saving the trainer state is actually in our build we are currently testing that will be out this week.
Trainer keeping up with you-  If you look up there are toggles on the top for difficulty. We default it to 5 but if you find the trainer is consistently behind you try increasing the difficulty.
Stereoscopic 
You are correct this is set to monoscopic on the Go for power and performance reasons. We want to prioritize frame rate and when the Go battery gets low it can struggle. Eric can maybe go into more detail here
Bike Computer
Our solution to this is a more customizable hud, which is in our backlog, we would like you to be able to choose the information you find important and where it should be displayed.  It is a big project though so it may be a little while for this one.
Account Page
We agree this is mostly function over form and if I could snap my fingers and make it happen it would be much improved. It's 100% on our list of low hanging fruit.
M3U Radio
Leaving this one for Eric as it's a bit outside my wheel house.
Explorer Rides
As we add more and more rides and get more users the number of rides available has really exploded. Our focus will be to improve the in game search features first but having a more functional search function on the site is also a great idea.  I know I like to see and plan my workouts ahead of time so that when it's time to work out I just Go and don't have to think about.

Thanks again for the feedback and please keep it coming. We appreciate all of the help our users give us in improving the games and making them better for everyone.

[nickhod]

Thanks for the reply.

Increasing difficulty did the trick for the trainer. Had my butt kicked on level 7 

A customisable HUD sounds good, but just more flexibility on placing the current HUD would be a win too, I feel like I need it a bit lower for a spin bike.

Searching for Explorer rides is definitely what I'd like to see most, so it's great that it's planned in the app.

[emalafeew]

I'm back from a quick motorcycle camping trip through Vermont. Was amazing IRL so hope to share on VZfit!

Regarding monoscopic, Play doesn't have that option like Explorer, and is always stereoscopic even on the Go. You can test by closing each eye and seeing that nearer things move position.

Internet radio should be possible to add through the Radio Pro plugin to Unity. Will put on the backlog!

You can lower the HUD for spin bikes using the "Low HUD" option in Play and Explorer.

Agree with everyone else Snowpelt said. Welcome and keep giving us feedback, we make releases every month!

[nickhod]

Regarding monoscopic, Play doesn't have that option like Explorer, and is always stereoscopic even on the Go.  You can test by closing each eye and seeing that nearer things move position.

Thanks for the reply, sounds like you had a great weekend. I'm British and looking forward to exploring parts of America with VZFit. The full res 'sightseeing' feature of the new build should be great for this.

The player avatar / controller is definitely monoscopic in Play on the Go. (The overall scene is stereo).
I saw two people comment the same thing on here. The difference between the stereo and mono bike on Explorer is huge and the tank, horse, pegasus etc are unmistakably monoscopic on the the Go.

For instance, in the tank game, it looks like I'm sat on top of a flat plane with a tank texture over it, there's no depth.

This person reported that everything suddenly looked "3D" when moving to the Quest, which is odd for a VR game
https://forums.vzfit.com/showthread.php?tid=269

Seems like I'll be getting a Quest soon anyway (thanks Oculus!), but you might want to take another look at it.

Internet radio station support sounds great.

Noted about the low HUD, but it's just not quite low enough (for me anyway) if you're using your spin bike like a road bike with the saddle higher than the handle bars.
Normal, low, lower, lowest  or something like that would cover all needs.

[nickhod]

The newest build (25th June) has made everything stereoscopic in Play on the Go.

The difference is very noticeable, and a big improvement.

[emalafeew]

Noted about the low HUD, but it's just not quite low enough (for me anyway) if you're using your spin bike like a road bike with the saddle higher than the handle bars.
Normal, low, lower, lowest  or something like that would cover all needs.

When we get to our customizable HUD, the idea is also to let people place and size it exactly how they like!

[jqnatividad]

You may want to check out Supernatural and how they track heart rate real-time - they use a combo of a smartphone app and a heart rate tracker.

https://www.getsupernatural.com/

For their IOS implementation, coz of gamification incentives in HealthKit, and the new workouts everyday, I’ve been using it on a daily basis since their launch about two months ago (and have lost 12 lbs in the process!)

[emalafeew]

It's on our backlog to build a companion app in order to integrate HealthKit and iWatch. Everytime someone mentions it goes up in priority.

We plan connect to other bluetooth heartrate trackers without that, but that would just be for displaying heartrate in our HUD and making better calories estimates for Fitbit, because we can't talk to HealthKit without a companion app.