The exercise bike built on an interactive gaming experience

The exercise bike built on an interactive gaming experience

Remember when Pokémon GO turned our worlds upside down by suddenly allowing you to chase, interact and catch your favorite Pokémon? Overnight, everyone was overcome with the urge to “catch ‘em all”.

Back then, people were running around chasing their childhood dreams of catching their very own Pikachu (and still are to this day). People were seen walking around town glued to their phones for hours, days and weeks. 500 million people downloaded the app in its first year. Imagine how many of them multiplied their daily activity hours during this time. A study done by Althoff, White and Horvitz states that Pokémon Go alone increased the users' average activity by 1473 steps a day. That's more than a 25% increase compared with their prior activity level, a testament to how we can utilize games to get into a healthy rhythm.

Building interactive games

While developing the games for The PlayPulse ONE, we observed the same basic principles that Niantic did when creating Pokémon GO. The balance between the required physical movement and the use of gaming controllers is highly prioritized, which ends up keeping you intrigued, and so keeps you moving.

     “By balancing the requirement of pedaling, we are trying to create a suitable physical challenge for the players. Not too hard, but also not too easy.” - Christoffer Hagen, Co-Founder and Head of Content - PlayPulse

Take PedalTanks (one of the launch games on the PlayPulse ONE) as an example. If you don’t pedal and move the tank around the arena, you’ll run out of ammo, and end up losing the game. You’ll be practicing your mind too, with strategic thinking needed to take out your enemies in a variety of different ways.

The same principle can be found in Helios, the single-player Rougelite game on the PlayPulse ONE. If you're too defensive in terms of speed, you’ll end up being caught by the road crumbling beneath you, and you won’t be able to reach the end of the road to advance to the next level. But you also have to be smart. By going full throttle, you might lose all your lives by jamming into the rocks and obstacles in your way, so strategic movement is important when advancing through the game.

Social interactive games

Let’s have another look at an experience that really got people moving. In the early 2000’s, Dave Ulmer from BeaverCreek, Oregon decided to reinvent the old classic called Letterboxing (1854). After posting some GPS coordinates on the Usenet newsgroup, a “treasure” could be found twice within the next two days. This treasure hunting experience evolved, and gave birth to the trend of Geocaching. Now, people from across the globe are digging, climbing and exploring new areas in their search for small trinkets of treasure. The same principle was used to sprout arguably even more interactive games such as Pokémon GO, Resources, Ingress Prime, The Witcher: Monster Slayer, and more.

When you’re unboxing your brand new PlayPulse ONE, you’ll find it preloaded with a few games, including our flagship game - PedalTanks. PedalTanks is a Capture the flag multiplayer online battle arena game. This means you’ll be able to play against other players from around the world. You’ll be able to build your garage of tanks, each with a large array of unique abilities that you can use to modify your growing army.

The possibilities and future - To infinity and beyond!

As we’re just getting started with mapping out the PlayPulse universe, there is a range of opportunities available. We’re starting off by releasing 4 games when the bike ships, but you can expect many more in the near future. We’re working hard to ensure that the games will be complex enough to keep everyone heavily engaged, but also be easy enough to understand and play, even for the noobs. All this on top of the interval training you won’t even realize you’re doing.

     “This is a concept we strive to achieve in most, if not all, of our games. Easy to play, but hard to master. With optional complexity, never as a requirement to succeed, but there to explore for people who want more.” - Christoffer Hagen, Co-Founder and Head of Content - PlayPulse

There really is no limit to what we can create for your PlayPulse journey. We also love receiving feedback and ideas thrown at us, so if you have any thoughts on what could be included in the games of the future, throw it at us in the Chat below, or send us an email at hello[at]playpulse.com. We can’t wait for you to hop on and enjoy the ride.

Let’s play.

References in this article: 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27923778/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching