Augmented and virtual reality storytelling platform creator, Within, has announced the release of its latest offering, Supernatural, a subscription-based, full-body fitness service for virtual reality.
Designed for Oculus Quest and paired with a user’s smartphone, Supernatural provides users with expertly coached daily workouts, detailed fitness tracking, a catalog of music and a chance to exercise in beautiful locations without ever leaving home.
“We built Supernatural to solve a problem we had,” says Within co-founder and CEO, Chris Milk. “Exercise requires long-term commitment to see benefits, but for many offers very little short-term enjoyment. Virtual reality allows us to make home exercise fundamentally fun and something you actually look forward to doing. It’s similar to playing a sport you love, but that sport is from the future, and it fits in your bedroom.”
Supernatural embraces a new paradigm when it comes to interactive physical movement in VR. Paired with photorealistic landscapes and energizing music, users are transported and challenged to move in ways that fire up heart rates and tone muscles. Daily on-demand workouts are personalized “rhythm maps,” designed by choreographers and coached by fitness trainers.
“We’ve taken everything we know and love about moving to music in VR and paired it with everything we wanted from in-home fitness: expert guidance, real-time metrics and results, while leaving out everything we don’t—mainly the rowing, running and cycling in place,” says Within co-founder, Aaron Koblin. “It’s both incredibly fun, and rooted in healthy movement.”
Supernatural includes the following features:
- Daily workouts that combine popular music, expert guidance, and beautiful destinations that include the Great Wall of China, the Galapagos’ Isabela Island, Ethiopia’s Erta Ale Volcano and the Machu Picchu Ruins;
- A growing team of coaches that guide users through form, breathing, and motivation;
- On-demand fitness that helps target major muscle groups;
- Dynamic difficulty, which keeps users challenged in real-time. As users improve, workouts get harder;
- Premium music from top artists thanks to industry partnerships with companies such as Universal Music Group, and others;
- Intelligent and personalized metrics that calibrate a user’s height, arm span, squat depth and lunges to ensure that every workout is safe, challenging and mapped specifically to the user’s body;
- Users can pair Supernatural with select heart rate monitors to help track progress and provide detailed workout summaries;
- Users can join the platform’s community using the Supernatural Companion App for smartphones where they can find friends, share workouts, and participate in weekly leaderboards.
Created by Within, Supernatural started two years ago, with an aim of creating an exercise service that could help users enjoy workouts. The company looked at what VR could uniquely do that other fitness systems couldn’t, and, whether it could achieve the mental and physical equivalent of 30 minutes of snowboarding in the Swiss Alps, all from the comfort of the user’s home.
Within states that Supernatural was built using the guidance of experts in the fields of physical fitness, biokinesiology, and healthy human movement, and their guidance has been combined with the knowledge of choreographers, video game designers, artists, and engineers to create the finished platform.
Supernatural is available now in the Oculus Store. Users can sign up for a 30-day free trial and USD $19/month founding member* rate. Membership automatically begins and renews monthly after free trial ends, but users can cancel at any time. For details visit www.getsupernatural.com.
*Founding members receive a free, sweat-proof silicone liner to protect their headset. Available while supplies last.
