Innovating a VR fitness platform to take your workout out, 365 days a year, without ever leaving home.
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Transforming workouts into experiences.
In concert with our ongoing work with Nautilus our roll involves constantly identifying and innovating ways in which they can drive their brands forward. One such initiative involved the development of a virtual hiking experience to extend the TreadClimber platform and further position it outside of the competitive circle of treadmill, elliptical, and stair stepping solutions, and to do so in such a manner that furthered the central brand goal of marketing fitness experiences rather than merely products.
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In our analysis of the fitness landscape we discovered one of the greatest gaps in home fitness to be— many across two of our primary audience segments would choose a real hiking experience over a treadmill experience if the opportunity to do so was available and secondly, that the primary deterrent for engaging in more outdoor experiences was the aversion to inclement weather conditions and lack of convenience to access new and interesting terrain.
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The solution— bring the worlds greatest hikes home, where they could be experienced as if you were actually on the trail, any day of the year, rain, shine, hail, or snow.
The launch campaign focus centered on identifying with the driver that, given the chance, people would much rather have real out door experiences, especially those that they might not otherwise even be able to have.
The iGo365 brand was developed to function as an endorsement bug to identify equipment enabled for VR through UP.Link as well as it's direct application in advertising and product marketing.
Determined to respond to this need we introduced iGo365™ Virtual Hiker via UP.Link™ for TreadClimber®, preparing to launch with 48 of the US's greatest hikes, available at Apple and Google storefronts and on Oculus Rift. Simply choose your trail and start hiking. Log in to group hikes with your friends, or even compare times and set challenges.
Future vision for the platform includes the ability for users to participate in recording and publishing their own hikes via a special system designed with GoPro in connection with the Fit 2 Be A Hero joint brand initiative.
This would extend the trail libraries to included user generated content they could publish to the platform in their hikes library, share with friends, or even monetize by publishing to the public trails library, multiplying the value of the platform to included trails during various seasons, weather conditions and even include urban hikes.
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Dynamic augmented content is a key element of the experience including: trail head data, mile markers, inclinometer, performance stats, key points of interests off camera in route, even third party brand and offer placements, such as object oriented
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third party brand placement, offer overlays on key objects, structures, or retail storefronts on urban hikes or at base areas.
UP's involvement in the initiative began with the platform proposal itself and extended through technology development, branding, marketing and advertising efforts.
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The product interface was built to leverage UP's proprietary UP.Link digital marketing platform, with an additional hardware interface designed to dynamically connect topographical data to pitch and resistance controls on the TreadClimber equipment. In this way, the physical equipment would dynamically respond to the realtime data streaming from the terrain on the trail. If the slope increased or decreased, the resistance and pitch control on the TreadClimber would respond accordingly. Users additionally had the ability to disable this feature or add a handicap to allow users to experience hikes they might not be otherwise capable of navigating in real life.
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This represented an entirely new fitness experience for TreadClimber users that dramatically increased the value return on their equipment investment and set the TreadClimber brand in an even greater category of its own.
