Fitness is always about the next big thing. People struggle to maintain rigid exercising habits. That means companies can often break onto the scene by offering innovative ways to engage people longer.
That’s what FitStar plans to do with its new iPad exercise app FitStar: Tony Gonzalez. This fitness application has NFL star Tony Gonzalez (the tight end for the Atlanta Falcons) running users through customized fitness routines. FitStar has all the features people expect from a modern workout app: It gamifies workouts, it supports FitBit, and it has its own social-media feed — but the software also uses a bit of magic it learned from video games.
“It’s our mission to create fitness apps inspired by true fitness experts,” FitStar chief executive Mike Maser said in a statement. “Tony and FitStar share the same vision of making fitness and wellness more accessible, appealing, and inspiring to a broad audience, and teaming up with Tony on FitStar: Tony Gonzalez, for our first fitness app, was a natural fit.”
Gonzalez will guide users through all of the exercises with custom videos. Each exercise video is tailors to the individual user depending on their skill level and strength. That means someone might get two minutes of Gonzalez performing side planks while another user gets him doing it for eight minutes.
The thing is that to the user, it will always look like Gonzalez is really doing the moves for as long as you are.
“Everything is shot in full HD, and Tony talks to you while you’re doing the move,” Maser told GamesBeat. “The magic of it is that we have five HD cameras feeds. We have separate voice-over tracks. And on a user-by-user basis we reassemble all of that audio-visual information into a natural-looking presentation.”
Maser said that his company took inspiration from games that have characters fluidly transitioning from one animation to another. He also pointed to the announcers in sports games as a good example. Titles like Madden NFL 13 stitch together a library of phrases from the voice-over artists to create what sounds much like natural speech.
FitStar believes that these specialized videos, where it feels like the instructor is doing the same exact amount of work that you are, will help keep users engaged longer.
The video library is all stored on FitStar’s servers as well. That means they could slowly add new moves over time.
The app is available now as a free download. FitStar plans to subsidize the its platform with specialized programs that target certain goals. Maser says the company plans to bring the program to additional mobile devices in the future.