Established in 1991, Equinox is a luxury fitness club with over 100 clubs worldwide, offering personal training and fitness programs in studios that inspire performance. Equinox’s innovative designs touch every inch of the brand, particularly its approach to indoor cycling, where the fitness club has fused cycling classes with gaming in a class dubbed The Pursuit.
Fuzzbuzz Technologies integrated Scalable Display Technologies into The Pursuit to create an easy-to-use, sustainable solution for blending high-resolution projectors on ultrawide screens.
The 45-minute spirited sweat sessions feature in-studio gaming with data visualizations designed to push riders past their personal bests. The cycling rooms are adorned with sharp aesthetics, soundproofing for superior acoustics, seamless projection for ultrawide imagery, dimmed mood lighting and bikes flanking theater-style tiers to create an optimal vantage point from anywhere in the room. The Pursuit’s unique gamification encourages members to compete against each other in a high-intensity race against time.
“Once they start pedaling, they can track their performance, represented as a spinning wheel with their assigned number, on an ultra-wide screen at the front of the room,” explained Fred Allman, chief operating officer for Fuzzbuzz Technologies. “The technology tracks the relationship between the speed of the rider’s pedaling and the intensity of their resistance. The total output translates on the spinning wheel. Riders can compete individually or in groups through a series of games displayed on the screen. The competitive style and unique design set the Pursuit apart from other indoor cycling experiences.
“Equinox required a high-quality solution with a seamless user experience. The display is one of the main components of the workout, so we needed to design a solution with crisp image quality. We selected projectors versus LED displays because it was the only feasible method of producing a high-resolution video display across a 32×10 aspect ratio image. We simply couldn’t achieve our desired output with LED displays. Although, with multiple projectors, we were faced with the challenge of creating a single, seamless image.”
Scalable’s software is integral to the interactive nature of the classes and their digital components by captivating riders with graphics and leaderboards projected onto the wall in front of the riders. Additionally, the software provides Fuzzbuzz Technologies with a reliable, user-friendly interface to easily recalibrate the ultrawide displays to ensure a pristine audiovisual experience for each rider.
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“It was easy for the projectors to get bumped and lose alignment,” explained Allman. “There’s a lot of movement in the room and the slightest adjustment can ruin the entire display and, as a result, hinder the rider’s experience. Originally, we were manually calibrating each projector. It created an influx of service calls and caused downtime for the system because we’d have to send a technician to the studio to calibrate the projector physically. We were impressed by a working example of Scalable Display Technologies and decided to try it to determine if it would simplify calibration.”
Scalable provides users with a unique technical advantage by pairing high-performance displays with quick, seamless calibration. Scalable’s software automatically calibrates the color, intensity, and geometry of images from multiple projectors, resulting in a single, seamless digital display. Ideal for virtually any application, Scalable’s software works on flat, curved domes and completely custom screen shapes.
“Scalable’s automatic calibration has eliminated 80% of the service calls,” noted Allman. “The automatic recalibration enables the client’s IT department to recalibrate the system remotely. They can log into the system and utilize the webcam to analyze the current display. After their initial analysis, they can recalibrate and adjust, as needed. It’s incredibly simple for them. The client loves it because it reduces service calls and downtime.”