This Star Trek-like holographic bicycle could make Peloton obsolete

Former Google VR researcher Samuel Watson spent the early days of Covid in Columbia. There, he found solace while riding his bike with friends outside Medellin as the world descended into chaos. As the landscape of the Andes mountains zoomed by, he focused on the road pavement, becoming fascinated by the way time just disappeared while cycling. “My mind could wander and three hours would be gone like that,” he tells me via email. But whenever he used the stationary bike in the gym, just ten minutes seemingly warped into ten hours of boredom.  That’s when he thought that, perhaps, there could be a much better way to create a stationary bike—one that would create that same feeling as traveling through real space. He wanted to put people into that Andes-like magical time warping dimension within the confines of their homes, just like Picard and Ryker used to do in the Holodeck aboard the Enterprise. He claims his new invention, the HoloBike (recently launched on Kickstarter ), does just that. [Photo: Saga] The psychology of outdoor exercise at home After returning to his home state of California, Watson developed a prototype of the HoloBike by wiring an old 1987 Schwinn Varsity bike frame to a 3D display that used eye tracking to give you the illusion of looking through a magical portal into another reality. It really worked. Since the very first demo he gave of their earliest prototype in his Santa Monica workshop, it was clear to him and others that the HoloBike tapped into that meditative sense of moving through space. “This phenomenon known as optic flow, is at the core of what makes training outdoors so invigorating,” he claims. “In fact, it is the basis for a branch of psychology known as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).” (A side note: While the use of EMDR in psychology therapies like treating trauma disorders is quite extended amongst some therapists—and it has become quite popular thanks to celebrities using it — other scientists remain skeptical about it because there are no definitive studies that prove its effect).

How it works Watson’s company, Saga , worked with London-based design studio Layer ’s founder Benjamin Hubert and his team to create the stationary bike. It’s an elegant and minimalistic black and white frame. It uses bright orange accents to mark the levels and buttons that serve to adjust its shape. Hubert and his team crafted the bike’s ergonomic frame to support a variety of body types and riding styles, accommodating riders between 4’11” and 6’4” in height. The design takes cues from high-performance road bikes, Layer says, offering an athletic and comfortable riding stance. This design is crowned by a panoramic and stereoscopic 27-inch screen that provides a wide field of view at 4K resolution. It is a light-field display, a technology that shows high-resolution 3D images that don’t require goggles of any kind, not even polarized glasses. The sense of depth is directly visible to the naked eye. From the beginning, his experience as a VR expert told him that using a headset was the wrong solution for this. “They’re heavy, sweaty, the lenses fog. Not to mention the nausea, especially when simulating cycling motion,” he says. And he’s right. Even the most advanced VR goggles are not good for sports, and probably not good for anything else. As the Apple Vision Pro debacle and Meta Oculus crashing sales show, this is a form factor that most people just don’t want. But that’s only one part of the three-part formula that Watson and his team came up with to truly create the parallel dimension that appears to live inside that screen. “The big issue from a user experience point of view is that the pre-recorded video is boring,” says Watson. Unlike traditional static bikes like the Peloton—which rely on pre-recorded video content—the HoloBike utilizes volumetric scans of real-world landscapes to generate its environments. It actually navigates these three-dimensional worlds, which are rendered in real-time by a powerful 20-teraflop Nvidia graphic processor to align with the riders’ pedaling speed and viewing angle. [GIF: Saga] The parallax effect However, the key part to make it all click for the user’s brain is its front-facing stereo camera. This camera uses artificial intelligence to track the position of the rider’s eyes with sub-millimeter accuracy allowing the screen to adapt to the user’s gaze. Knowing what the position of the eyes is in relation to the screen, the computer can actually change the screen so the rider actually believes it is a window to another dimension. This creates a parallax effect, Watson says. So when you move your head right or left, up or down, the landscape perspective in the HoloBike screen changes in a way that your brain buys that it is a real thing. Combined with the ultra-high resolution of the display, this effect effectively creates the sense of presence and immersion. This is not a new concept. You can see how 3D parallax works in this demonstration from 2007:

It’s just the same as with the HoloBike, but by using a true 3D display combined with an eye-tracking AI, the volumetric landscape captures, and the Nvidia graphic processor to create a perfectly believable parallax effect, making it all feel as though the virtual landscapes are extending beyond the confines of the monitor.  Motion feedback Then there’s the pedals, which use a “dynamic electromagnetic resistance” to create a kind of a haptic feedback effect that adjusts the feeling of your feet according to the virtual terrain you are riding. This means that riders experience resistance changes that mimic real outdoor conditions, such as uphill climbs or downhill coasts, enhancing the realism of the workout. “That’s how they are able to tap into the phenomenon of optic flow to simulate the benefit of outdoor exercise in an indoor environment,” Watson says. The HoloBike is available for pre-order now, with prices starting at $2,600. Saga promises that it will deliver your very own piece of the Star Trekish future of indoor cycling this winter.