We've built www.co-train.space to stay fit while staying home. You pick fitness video on Youtube, it plays synchronously for everybody in the group and you see your peers thanks to Jitsi Meet (Zoom-like software).
I am now exercising with my parents every morning and feel much more connected to them. Looking forward to hearing what you think!
Great Work! I love the clean layout and the focus on the user experience. I work in the fitness industry and think there is some great potential here. Especially in the personal trainer space. Keep it up! You are on to something here.
First of all, it looks great, good job! My question is that why do you limit yourself with only fitness? For example, study sessions are a great example that can benefit from your product.
Basically it was the use case for me personally. I had to spend 2 weeks on quarantine totally alone separated even from wife so we wanted to exercise together. But yeah, I think you are right, there are many potential use cases!
First thing that came to my mind too! Last night I watched a YouTube video with a friend, and we did a manual 5,4,3,2,1 countdown to synch, and then text chatted via WhatsApp, video chat of one's choosing could also be used. But rolling it all into one is nice.
It would be nice to be able to do the same thing with a shared Plex server, but not sure if that would be as easy.
This is awesome and has a lot of potential to be a platform for fitness instructors to use to deploy their classes and do online training. I have had online coaches for a while and there isn't a great solution that is formatted for this use case. If a trainer can do a live class, with 20+ students who are paying, and have them be able to check everyone's form i a simple view, you are going to go very far.
Hey - looks great. We are building a video platform for an alpha project we have. Any interest in possibly helping join and build it out? Drop me an email: nathaniel.jewell@gmail.com
If I created a Zoom meeting with the trainees, and shared my screen and computer audio running my training video, would I have the same experience?
Phrased in terms of Zoom since I've become oh so familiar with it these past few months. I see the value, since it's probably easier to connect to than a Zoom meeting.
Screen sharing videos on zoom had never been a great experience. I think the difference is that everybody is streaming the YouTube video here individually.
Feature idea: use the webcam to project the watcher's image/body onto the instructor's. Then with some computer vision magic, gamify how close your workout matched the instructor's workout.
Does this handle ad breaks? I think with a monetized video different people may get different length ads at different places. Just curious how this would handle that situation.
Oh, I think I did not test this. Completely forgot I have YouTube subscription. I guess it should be possible to detect when and starts and handle it. But sudden pauses due to ads can ruin UX especially for fitness...
What kind of issues did you have syncing with youtube videos and what kind of latency do you experience?
BTW Great initiative and certainly could use that tech for many avenues like remote classroom, any presentation with Q&A. Few others I suspect, but great start.
Technically syncing is easy, websocket + Youtube API. The biggest issue for UX though is that a user should click on the video at least once. Otherwise, Firefox will block sync commands.
The latency can be 3-5 seconds for the first sync, when the video is initialized and unbuffered. For the next syncs its < 1 second.
Interesting as I would of thought fitness video's would need tighter latency due to the beat, but then, that can actually work in your favour as the beat will be way less than a second, so could always sync upon that for what would appear to be perfect sync, yet 1-3 beats offset beat out of sync and yet the illusion of perfect sync.
With workout videos usually 120-140 BPM, sub second, let's say 1 second for ease on 120 BPM would be 2 beats per second and so a sync of 2 beat offset would be spot on. Now a 140 BPM would be 3 beats, but you get the idea. By syncing the beats with an offset to cater for the latency and the BPM, you can give the illusion of perfect video sync. More so when doing repetitive motion to that beat, just seems like it would work really well. Certainly makes management of latency a much more easier task and allow for buffering as well depending upon how many beats you want to offset, so could handle latency spikes and brief drops. Which again, makes the things easier when you can control and fix latency , though as you can't do that, planning it out of the equation is always a treat. Food for thought perhaps.
But it is your baby, you pick the formula you want to feed it. But hope you do well whatever direction as certainly has potential in many avenues. Remote rave anybody :).
Regarding your wall projector, it would be cool to have a camera project your image onto the instructors. Then some computer vision magic to grade how close you matched their exercise.
Just because a company offers a product that does something new and different does not equate to where the industry is truly going (as much as founders/CEOs may wish otherwise).
It's more about where the customer/consumers are going...yes you can lead them to an extent, but on that note are products like Tonal actually selling and if so, what clip and density?
I would ask for evidence of adoption of something (beyond just the mere fact it exists) to support the "where the market is going" type of thinking...
I got very lucky and got a a very used Epson 3500 on Ebay for $350.
Keystoning not a problem. I knew I didn't need 4k. I just needed something that could go BIG and fill up the whole wall floor to ceiling to get the effect I was going for.
Nice. Most of the instructors on our system* have pivoted to run their classes online like that now too. YouTube or Vimeo synchronized with a live Zoom.
It's actually working really well for them as they can now open to a wider audience! It's great to see how people have adapted so quickly in the lockdown.
There have been these posted here, I forget their names though.
I've been thinking of doing some with all my Aunts watching their 60's-80's home videos. They all Zoom in, watch it synchronized and commentate. Would be interesting to have the family history documented, otherwise it's just an old video of a familiar face in some place.
It's a little suspect that you and multiple other names made accounts just to post simplistic glowing comments about how excited you are to work out with your mom, just like the person who posted this.
Hey! I personally followed HN but never commented before so had to login only now when news about our platform was posted. Didn't see multiple simplistic comments except for dpie123's who is my friend and an active user of co-train.space:)
We've built www.co-train.space to stay fit while staying home. You pick fitness video on Youtube, it plays synchronously for everybody in the group and you see your peers thanks to Jitsi Meet (Zoom-like software).
I am now exercising with my parents every morning and feel much more connected to them. Looking forward to hearing what you think!