Designing Alo Moves XR
Alo Moves XR transforms how users experience yoga, Pilates, and mindfulness, making it feel like you're attending a personalized fitness class with a stunning view – all from the comfort of your home. Staying true to Alo Moves' mission of empowering people to live healthier and more fulfilling lives, this new XR experience continues that vision. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how we collaborated with Alo Moves and Meta to create this groundbreaking fitness experience.
Partnering with Alo Moves
From the outset, our collaboration with Alo Moves and Meta centered on redefining the quality of existing fitness experiences. We aimed to create an immersive, mixed-reality environment that went beyond the typical 2D video or VR fitness experiences, transporting users while ensuring they maintained spatial awareness and fully engaged in their practice.
We experimented with various capture methodologies to determine the best way to present instructors within the headset. Our goal was to deliver a sense of presence and fidelity that made users feel like they were receiving a personalized class from a world-renowned Alo Moves instructor.
We tested stereo footage with the Red Komodo-X using a 3ality Beamsplitter, the Z-Cam Pro, and volumetric video. While stereo footage provided some sense of presence, the volumetric instructor was the clear winner, offering a truly amazing next-generation experience. We all experience the world spatially, there is no comparison to having the ability to practice with an instructor and walk around them or pause and rotate the three-dimensional mini-instructors to study a pose.
Volumetric Instructors
Alo Moves worked closely with their instructors to design classes specifically for the Quest headset. Partnering with Metastage, a leading Volumetric Capture & XR production studio, we captured the instructors' classes using 106 cameras on their stage.
This process produced volumetric assets that offer users a more lifelike and immersive experience by preserving natural movements and detail of the instructors while maintaining longer, uninterrupted sessions not generally associated with traditional volcap.
The experiences are streamed directly to the Quest 3 headset via a content delivery network (CDN), utilizing video compression techniques similar to those found in traditional video streaming services.
This data stream is then assembled in the headset into a fully immersive volumetric asset. This method not only minimizes the load on the headset, keeping the experience lightweight and responsive, but also allows for frequent and seamless content updates. This is especially important for ensuring a smooth user experience, while maintaining the high-quality performance expected of modern applications.
The combination of immersive visuals and photorealistic 3D instructors – including a “mini-instructor” that can be repositioned for better pose reference – creates a truly first- of-its-kind training experience.
The Portals
A key feature of the Alo Moves XR experience is the inclusion of two distinct portal types, each designed to transport users into different virtual environments that enhance their workouts and meditative practices.
The Environmental Portal that accompanies the fitness experiences, transports users to serene locations like Thailand and Spain, further enhancing immersion. Initially, we experimented with stereo footage and 3D elements to heighten realism, but ultimately chose an 8K photo sphere for its crystal-clear resolution and minimal resource draw. The photo sphere’s curved design, along with subtle animations as part of the“window effect”, give the illusion of depth and parallax and make you feel like you are overlooking a vast vista.
The Mindfulness Portal was crafted to deliver a more introspective experience. In collaboration with Alo Moves meditation instructors, we developed a calming visual panoramic designed to soothe rather than distract. The scene incorporates seamlessly looping, randomly generated elements that create an ever-changing yet tranquil atmosphere as well as environmental lighting elements.
The serene scenes set the tone of the meditation and allows users to choose between watching the visuals or closing their eyes and simply listening to the experience. Mixed-reality was chosen to allow users to reposition the portal, whether sitting or lying down, so they can have total flexibility with their meditation practice.
Interactions and UI
Alo Moves XR was designed to be controller-free, with interactions optimized for hand-tracking. Drawing inspiration from real-life interactions, we aimed for an intuitive and accessible design. The hands first interface includes a white highlight indicator to show interactable elements, ensuring that interactions are easy but not prone to accidental activation.
A first-time user video helps guide newcomers through the core interactions when they first launch the experience, ensuring a smooth and intuitive onboarding process. The user interface (UI) has undergone a significant update from Alomoves.com integrating features designed to take full advantage of the mixed-reality environment. Despite these enhancements, it retains the key functionalities and familiar design elements that long-time Alo Moves users are accustomed to, ensuring that both new and experienced users feel comfortable navigating the platform.
Personalization
Alo Moves is committed to promoting a healthy lifestyle, and personalization plays a crucial role in this. Rather than creating pressure to engage daily, our achievement system encourages long-term consistency, rewarding users for building sustainable habits over time.
User class history is stored on our backend services, generating class recommendations based on usage, surveys, and favorites. The profile page displays overall activity; mindfulness versus fitness minutes; and allows users to filter class history by week, month, or year. These personalized features will help users build long term healthy habits.
Our collaboration with Alo Moves, Meta, and Metastage has opened up new possibilities in the wellness space, blending cutting-edge technology with fitness in ways that resonate with both seasoned practitioners and newcomers alike. Alo Moves XR expands the horizons of wellness experiences, making them more accessible, immersive, and engaging. As this platform continues to grow, we're excited to see how it redefines what it means to pursue fitness and mindfulness in a progressive, digitally connected world.
