No, and sure. But Peloton has plans for the Guide and the new software program expertise that comes with it. The firm desires to rely your exercise reps, research your progress over time, see which areas of the physique you’re fatiguing greater than others. It desires to develop its monitoring tech to different “modalities,” which suggests Peloton will finally apply this intelligence to yoga, or pilates, or different types of train. And it plans to cost $24 a month for this service, on prime of the value of the Guide {hardware} and any weights or heart-rate tracker you need to use with it.
“That’s where we’re putting our resources in AI,” says Tom Cortese, a Peloton cofounder and the firm’s chief product officer. “We want to understand the body, understand movement, and figure out how to incorporate that into an interactive workout.” By the finish of my Guide exercises, I used to be not but fully bought, however I used to be undoubtedly sore.
Guiding Light
The Peloton Guide seems to be like a set-top field, like an Apple TV or a Roku field, although Cortese bristles at the phrase “set-top box.” A set-top field “does this dumb thing of just streaming one-way content,” he insists. “The Guide is a high-powered computing device that’s trying to create connection and connectivity.”
He has some extent: The Peloton Guide is actually gadget-chic, clean and strong, with that tight cloth protecting and a nifty, adjustable magnetic mount that lets you angle the gadget so its digicam can see you correctly. The Guide’s distant is well-designed—with the naked minimal of buttons and a rubbery, sweatproof end. (Still, when Peloton finally shipped me a Guide on mortgage, I hooked up it to my TV utilizing an HDMI cable … like I might another set-top field.)
Following the Guide’s preliminary reveal final fall, lots of people—myself included—assumed it might work one thing like Microsoft Kinect, the body-tracking digicam that plugged into the XBox and allow you to work together with video video games by hopping round in your lounge. But in contrast to the Kinect, there aren’t any infrared sensors on this equipment. There’s a 12-megapixel wide-angle digicam, which streams 4K video at as much as 60 frames per second. The digicam is powered by Qualcomm’s QCS605 system-on-a-chip. This SoC was first launched again in 2018, so it’s historic by chip requirements, although Peloton says it collaborated with the chip maker to customise the system for Guide. This consists of picture and digital sign processors that crunch your biometric knowledge straight on the gadget itself.
“On device” has develop into one thing of a crutch-phrase for tech makers utilizing AI to course of doubtlessly delicate knowledge. The time period merely implies that for any knowledge that’s collected, machine intelligence is being utilized on the {hardware} itself as an alternative of on some distant cloud server. In Peloton’s case, this knowledge consists of the literal actions of your physique. So throughout my demo of the Guide, Schultz and different executives harassed privateness. Not solely would the video and audio captured by the Guide keep inside my home, however there are bodily privateness guards as effectively: The Peloton-stamped piece of plastic on the entrance of the Guide is a digicam defend, and the Guide’s microphones might be bodily switched off.
And whereas the digicam is capturing your live-streamed physique knowledge and making inferences about it, Peloton says it doesn’t retailer picture or video knowledge of you when you carry out the actions. It does, nevertheless, acquire and retailer metadata—the reality that you just labored out, which class you took, what number of reps you accomplished.
