[HN Gopher] Playpulse ONE - The gaming bike that unlocks your fi...
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Playpulse ONE - The gaming bike that unlocks your fitness
motivation
Author : punnerud
Score : 10 points
Date : 2021-04-13 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (playpulse.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (playpulse.com)
| smoldesu wrote:
| What they ought to do is just sell the bike as a
| controller/screen combo. That way you could hook up an
| Xbox/PS5/Switch/PC/Raspberry Pi/Steam Machine/whatever and have
| an actual shot at having any fun on it.
| geoelectric wrote:
| yeah, I was hoping this would be basically a home video
| receiver with built in monitor and streaming apps, and with a
| nice set of hookups for real devices.
|
| Instead it's a sub to a really janky looking gaming service, a
| very small handful of streaming apps, and a very expensive spot
| in the garage next to the FitDesk I also never use (but which
| would, with small mods, probably be better for this purpose
| than this).
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The person who makes an under-the-desk computer gaming peripheral
| for games and video (imagine watching or listening to a show but
| if you stop pedaling, it stops playing) and sells it for $3-400
| is gonna make a killing.
| voisin wrote:
| I really just want a spin bike that connects natively to Apple
| Fitness+ or Zwift without having to overpay for a peloton. Why
| doesn't this exist?!
| Koliakis wrote:
| It feels like this would be the perfect application for something
| like Geforce Now or even just the Steam streaming service.
| Provide an interface for users to customize the controls and
| provide an API for advanced users. You could probably coast on
| people being creative with the games they want to play by
| pedaling an indoor bicycle and become a cult hit by being
| accessible and ... cheap? (I have no idea how much these things
| usually cost)
| munk-a wrote:
| I think there's a real issue with any sort of bike desk/gaming
| setup which is that it's hard to interact with a stable system
| while biking so the interface necessarily needs to be tuned to
| cruder inputs. Biking is mostly a leg activity but the rest of
| the body does get involved and ends up making using something
| like a mouse or keyboard require a lot of work to provide a
| stable platform.
|
| Bikes as display devices with crude inputs feels like the
| maximum we can get for a consumer device.
| geoelectric wrote:
| I think the idea for these tends to be more like having the
| little cycle thing under your desk. You don't use them to
| exercise at full tilt or pull sprints, more like you spend an
| hour or two doing whatever while keeping your legs moving on
| something with just enough resistance to maybe matter.
|
| I briefly used a FitDesk (which is an exercise cycle with a
| lap-desk-quality platform rather than handlebars) and the
| cycling motions really weren't an issue for typing. But they
| did make the monitor bounce a lot. That was way more of a
| problem.
| munk-a wrote:
| Why is it that on a 1.2k bike there was no budget for a more
| comfortable bike seat. It'd also be nice if the device was less
| insanely vertical looking.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Almost all these bikes allow you to change out the seat with
| any other. Some people have real specific seat preferences. I'd
| be more concerned if you can't move the seat closer/further
| from the bars.
| ryandamm wrote:
| It's been done before, a few times:
|
| https://expresso.com/ https://www.virzoom.com/
|
| Expresso is more commercially-oriented, but iirc they lost high
| eight figures starting back in the 2000s. Virzoom only burned
| something like seven figures so far, working against the added
| drag of VR adoption.
|
| And then there's Zwift (https://www.zwift.com/), which doesn't
| carry the hardware costs and was recently valued at ~$1 bn+.
|
| If I'm playing armchair CEO, it seems like you do better off by
| leveraging the existing hardware ecosystem and just building a
| content / network play. Better to gift Apple / Google 30% than
| try to build, launch, and support hardware.
|
| Also, it's really hard to get enough users to support a fun
| enough game library; the overhead of custom content development
| is way, way too high unless you've got, I dunno, tens of millions
| of users? Everyone's thinking of Peloton, but they adopted the
| highly successful spin class model to the home. The change in
| behavior was staying home rather than going to the gym, not
| starting exercise instead of playing video games. And full
| disclosure, yes: I was skeptical of Peloton before they launched,
| too.
| punnerud wrote:
| https://expresso.com - Virtual biking
|
| https://www.virzoom.com - VR biking
|
| https://www.zwift.com - Interactive screen for real bike
|
| Playpulse - Exercise while gaming? A new twist for me.
| dvt wrote:
| Pretty fair take. I think their marketing line of "It's more
| fun than Fortnite!" is like.. _way_ off the mark. There 's no
| overlap of the the Venn diagram of Fornite players and the
| market for this bike.
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(page generated 2021-04-13 23:00 UTC)