Ride Anywhere

Riding in Las Vegas
Menu Screen

Inspiration

I was inspired after watching VR 360 cycling videos while on my exercise bike. It really created the feeling of being there and actually cycling through a different city.

There were points of friction though: using controllers, the view becoming unaligned, having to curate good videos. I decided to make Ride Anywhere, an app that solves those friction points and makes it easy to just put on a headset and start cycling in cities around the world.

What it does

Ride Anywhere allows you to cycle in different cities around the world. Jump on your exercise bike, put on your headset and choose a city. Leave your controllers- the app uses hand tracking to minimize friction. Once you choose a city, a 360 cycling video will play around you, giving you the feeling that you are cycling in that city while on your exercise bike.

How we built it

I build the app in Unity. I planned to launch a proof of concept with 1 city, Tampa, however due to an unfortunate gust of wind, my 360 camera was broken. I was able to license some videos from Dublin to get the app started and I hope to win funding to continue adding new cities soon. I used the Meta building block tools to easily add passthrough and hand tracking to the app.

Challenges we ran into

It was a challenge to learn how to encode the videos to smooth display over the network. The app is designed to be as frictionless as possible, so I didn't want users to have to download the videos of each bike route. The videos are streamed via a CDN which is the best experience for the user- it just took a while to get the settings right so it runs smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of how frictionless Ride Anywhere is. If you are looking for a quick bike ride, you can grab your headset, jump onto your exercise bike and within seconds you have been teleported to the city of your choice.

What we learned

I learned it's pretty hard to stream 360 videos from a CDN to a headset without careful consideration of every detail from the frame rate, to the bitrate and encoding.

What's next for Ride Anywhere

The dream is that Ride Anywhere wins funding so that I can get the equipment needed to film routes in new cities, and to license new route videos from partners around the world. I have many new cities waiting to be licensed once we achieve funding.