I co-founded the world's first Virtual Reality Gym that is the first of its kind in a 0 to 1 industry. The problems we solved were some of the hardest problems I have faced to date and spanned the product design spectrum.

The fitness industry has failed us. We've all seen it year after year. The gym is packed Jan 1... and empty by Jan 14th.

People can't stick to their fitness goals, causing frustration, deteriorating health, and trillions lost for businesses and the economy. We set out to solve this with immersive tech, deep game mechanics and inventing hardware.

Created the world's first Virtual Reality Gym winning The Best of

CES award, gaining investment by Tony Robbins and ultimately creating an addictive, first-of-its-kind, fitness solution.

Founding team, artists, developers

Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer

6 months

Create an addictive fitness that leverages the power of immersive tech to help our users level up their lives. Read my full vision post here. To watch the behind-the-scenes presentation see full video here.

The initial phases of research included visiting various trade shows for the gaming and fitness industries, talking to SMEs, and reading every book available. Really understand the market landscape as it existed was key to creating a vision hypothesis of what was to come.

Based on previous project experience, we had a deep understanding of consumer behavior and personas, so that allowed us to fast-track many of the traditional research stop gaps.

Understanding the opportunity

Creating a world-class innovative product is nothing if there isn’t a market opportunity. We saw a perfect storm of novel technologies + market trends coming that would prove for a once in a lifetime product creation opportunity.

We had experienced the magic of new immersive technologies, researched the converging markets and the upcoming opportunities, but still needed to establish a target market hypothesis. So, we started with some simple persona and empathy mapping and continued to iterate.

Throughout the project, we continued to brainstorm of how the product ecosystem would be present in a users life and how we could really flip their pains into gains.

This journey changed drastically throughout the process as we learned from various rapid tests.

One thing was for sure, we had a strong opinion about what elements would be in the journey. We were passionate about resistance training, mobile apps for social connectivity and VR as the tool. With those flags planted, we started to prototype.

Fast forward and we had designed a workout program, a fully functioning hardware machine (winning Best of CES), an immersive virtual reality game and a fully featured mobile app.

As you can see this project was robust from stem to stern and is shared to demonstrate my ability to take a 0 to 1 type of idea and, with hard work and focus, bring it into reality.

This was a multi-disciplinary project involving many talented people but my specific role was to handle all product design and product management aspects of the effort. I created all the mobile app designs and overarching Design Systems in Figma, I prototyped/invented new novel interaction patterns using various art software in 2D and 3D and led the creation of the overall Black Box VR creative world.

The project went from $0 valuation to $40M and was invested in by names like Tony Robbins, won Best of CES awards and was even featured on the HBO show Billions. Overall this has been the single greatest design innovation of my career and is helping people get addicted to fitness and level up their lives.

The learnings are too numerous to count, but this project helped me extend my product design expertise to the metaverse and gain a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities that are going to be possible with upcoming AR/VR tech.