8/30/2023 0 Comments Onyx fitness![]() Companies like Peloton, Tonal, and Mirror, are breaking out of that static experience and building smart, interactive experiences that are far better than the old workout video. Of course, there have been some big players doing an amazing job with that. If you look at the market for personal training and studio classes, that’s more like $15B, and if we build an experience that’s better than those offerings, the market for on-demand fitness will continue to grow rapidly. If we execute our vision, choosing Onyx will be a no brainer compared to those kinds of experiences. ![]() You click start, you watch a video, you hear an audio workout - it doesn’t matter what you do, the trainer says good job. These things have been largely the same for the past several decades. On-demand fitness is estimated at a $3B market when you take into account fitness apps, videos, streaming, etc. Where does Onyx fit within the broader space of fitness and technology? ![]() We really want to make personalized, immersive, and social fitness classes accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. We want to build a future where every single person has their own fitness instructor. Long-term success will be seeing an active community where people are nudging each other to work out together and more often, following each other’s metrics and achievements, and motivating each other to improve. We’re also considering bringing real instructors in the mix, whether it’s through live classes, or direct communication, for a more human experience. Not to mention, this makes the whole experience way more fun, and enjoying fitness is half the battle. By working out with people they know, especially in real-time, users will be able to challenge each other and push each other to improve. We plan to take it a step further by letting you create private leaderboard groups with your friends, and eventually, real-time competition through game-like matchmaking. Right now, Onyx lets you compete with other users who have previously completed the same workout. In the context of fitness, that’s either your instructor, friends, or classmates. Building a habit is more likely when someone else holds you accountable. Our goal is to merge the value of personalized digital fitness with the accountability of real people. What are the long-term ambitions for Onyx? We’re already seeing that with our early users which is great. We want to see people who use Onyx three to four times a week continuously pushing themselves further and progress toward their goals. ![]() As a result, you get much more out of your workout. The digital trainer improves form and prevents injury, but it also pushes you to finish your reps. We’ve been hearing a lot of feedback that one of the biggest values of Onyx is not just the real-time feedback, but also the accountability. We want to give users everything that a fitness instructor can (or close to it), without the cost of a training session or class - and on their own schedule. We want to build the most personalized fitness experience that can be taken anywhere. What do you hope to achieve in the short-term? After months of research and development, we got the technology to work, and have now brought 3D pose tracking to a mobile device for the first time, allowing us to build Onyx in a much more accessible and distributable way. Thanks to recent advances in hardware, we realized that it might be possible on a mobile device, though it hadn’t been previously achieved. We knew it was possible to track a person’s body movements with a camera, and we thought we could use use it for fitness tracking James’s background is in computer vision - he was a researcher at Berkeley AI Lab for several years working on 3D object reconstruction. Soon, we started to think that we could just build it. Essentially what we wanted a trainer, but we didn’t want to spend the money. We wanted something that could track our workouts automatically and give us feedback for all the other exercises we were doing. We used a Fitbit or Apple Watch to track our fitness, but it only really works for running and cycling. Were we able to do more reps over time? Were we getting faster? Was our form getting any better? The main problem was that we couldn’t tell if we were actually making progress. When we couldn’t make it, we were using fitness apps like Nike Training Club and Aaptiv. We were going to the gym and fitness classes as much as we could. One thing that remained consistent was our fitness routine. James and I had worked on a few different ideas. Where did the idea for Onyx come from and how has it evolved?
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