As the basement home gym is in its neverending buildout, we move to the cardio equipment. We have a low end airbike and low end magnetic rower, a bike trainer for my bike (which is no longer road worthy since the screws on the handlebars are stripped), and recently we got a low end treadmill. And by low end, what I really mean is at the low end of what people who actually care about this would accept (not the cheapest stuff, which tends not to survive a year of heavy use). But one way of upgrading the equipment is to use virtual fitness apps, and Kinomap in particular has been designed to make it possible even with low end stuff like we have, and it makes long workouts a lot more interesting.
Long duration endurance indoors is unspeakably boring, which is the source of the joke that most exercise equipment is used as clothes hangers. In recent years, one way to combat this are virtual fitness apps. So, unlike mere exercise videos, virtual fitness apps are characterized by having their play be dependent on how hard you are working on the equipment, typically by measuring your power output and adjusting your in-app speed accordingly. Zwift is a graphics game version of this, you run or bike inside a computer game and your avatar goes through the course along avatars of everyone else on the platform. Peloton and Hydrow are a different breed within this category, they try to replace a studio class with videos and measures your performance and progress. Kinomap, which I use, has real world videos, but plays them at a speed that is based on your power.
One thing virtual fitness requires is equipment that measures power, which is used by the game to track performance and set the speed of play. But this tends to be mid to high end equipment (the sensors and the data displays that goes with them is a big part of the cost for the $1000+ equipment). Those who have lower end equipment without the sensors (identifiable by cheap data displays that have no accuracy to speak of) cannot take part in that. Enter Kinomap with use of the camera sensor.
Kinomap, like all such apps, is based on connecting smart exercise equipment to the app via Bluetooth. It connects to a very wide range of exercise equipment by a wide range of companies. The very opposite of vendor lock-in. And in addition to supporting a wide range of equipment, it includes a feature that uses the app device (smartphone or tablet) camera as a sensor to estimate power so the app will still work. This works through computer vision. For running, it sees your head jump up and down to estimate cadence (step counters effectively do the same thing, except using accelerometers). For rowers, the camera can measure distance and watches you go back and forth to measure stroke rate (I'm a little hazy on how cycling works, it seems to track your pedaling cadence but I cannot tell what it does next)
Why is this important?
1. It is fun. Rowing to blue sky and blue oceans listening to the boat cutting through water and birds in the distance is a lot more fun than staring at walls. Even with music.
2. It is motivating. The virtual apps let you row/run/cycle along with others and you can use them as rabbits or chasers.
3. Collecting performance data is the key to improvement. The big difference between athletic training and exercise is in training you record your performance and use performance over time to show progress. And Kinomap allows that even when using equipment that does not.
So, my contribution to the internet. As the people who make virtual fitness app reviews and demos are generally serious enough to have the connected, smart fitness equipment that virtual fitness apps use to work, there are not much in the way of demos on using non-connected equipment with these apps. So here is my demonstration of the use of Kinomap with a very low end magnetic rower (good enough that reviewers say it is not bad, but not good enough to collect data) with the Kinomap camera sensor.
