VirZOOM

New VirZOOM Video and our "Moat"

founder @ VirZOOM

Published on Oct 16, 2018

The new video we posted today here on WeFunder is the story of VirZOOM from the first prototype to the latest generation VZfit. We show how the company progressed as a business as well as how the product was developed and refined over the years.

Investors should always ask of a company raising funds: "What's your 'moat' that protects you from competition?"

In our case in addition to our patent pending that protects our motion controls, every aspect of VirZOOM that could not be architect-ed had to be discovered over time. There was no blueprint for development of VR Fitness games system that effectively motivates you to move without making you feel locomotion discomfort, and could act as a platform for a business at scale.

This had to be discovered. It took several years of iterative development in stages: prototype, alpha, beta, and shipping versions with feedback first from 60 alpha testers then 90 beta testers then feedback from some of the 1,000s of paying customers via forums, interviews, and surveys.

To meet the requirements of the Life Fitness partnership and execute on our plan to move into the commercial fitness market the VR content, menu systems, and tutorials had to be adapted to meet commercial health club requirements, both for club staff and the members: self-administered to permit member use without staff involvement and self-teaching games that members learn on their own.

A complex back-end accounting and licensing infrastructure had to be developed to allow the business model to scale. One of the end-components to the system is VZ Sensor, a small package of proprietary hardware and firmware that has to accurately sense the motion of the stationary bike pedal crank to a fraction of a millimeter per second and transmit the data to a PC with near zero latency. Any latency and the effect of controlling your avatar in VR with a bike won't work.

The data are encrypted as is the handshake between the sensor and the games such that the sensor is authenticated back to our servers to ensure a valid use license. To prevent pirating, the firmware is occasionally re-written "over the air" via Bluetooth. If our servers don't detect a valid key the sensor is turned off. A pirated sensor becomes useless.

There is a wealth of similarly specialized technology in VirZOOM that makes the whole system effective, scalable and defensible. Even if we were to publish a blueprint there are a limited number of engineers, artists, game designers, and programmers who could be assembled to follow it, assuming they'd all get along and function together as a team as well as the VirZOOM team has.

That said, a similarly talented and dedicated team with at least $7M in funding could possibly re-create VirZOOM in two or three years.