Immersive home-fitness solution using muscle-based haptic wearables
Innovate UK
Valkyrie Industries Limited
Valkyrie Industries is developing a new immersive home-fitness solution using muscle-based haptic wearables. By exploiting our patent in electro-musclular stimulation (EMS) and experience in virtual reality (VR) content creation, we will deliver a system that brings efficient, personalised and engaging fitness routines to people's homes. The design foundations grant will allow us to carry out in-depth customer research, including a human-centered design of low-cost prototype experiences, engagement with stakeholders, and both user-experience and commercial feasibility research. This project falls under the Design for Cross Sector Immersive Projects, applying immersive technologies, haptics and VR gaming, to fitness and healthcare.    Valkyrie Industries, after working with heavy-industry partners, is now focusing its attention on the fitness market. Our patented technology allows sensations of weight and resistance in muscles by applying EMS in VR. Recently, VR became a popular destination for home fitness, with games such as Beat Saber and FitXR reaching revenues in the tens of millions of dollars. Additionally, EMS devices such as Slendertone or Sixpad have been extensively used by both professional and amateur athletes, with a renewed interest growing in recent years. We will combine the efficiency of EMS for muscle training and recovery with gamified VR routines, building upon our experience in VR and haptics.    The design foundations grant will allow us to understand the motivations of the fitness users, test our market and validate hypotheses, create various simple prototypes and test them with customers. We will use the double-diamond design process to approach the idea of using VR and haptics for fitness. We will:    Discover: run workshops with fitness instructors and gym-goers to understand their preferences for the in-house gym experiences. We will understand different training regimes, how different muscle groups are trained etc.    Define which exercises can be potentially ported to VR headsets. Based on the stakeholders' interviews, we will formulate the product requirements, the features of the software and hardware systems, the social aspect of the system etc.    Develop simple immersive game prototypes using our proprietary wearable haptic technology, and apply it to different muscle groups. We will create 2-4 different simple experiences    Deliver: test those prototypes with our focus groups and stakeholders at Here East, gauging the efficiency and engagement of our technology. By the end of the project, we will understand which direction we should take in our further R&D to bring the product closer to market.
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