A look behind the scenes at Towermax Fitness and the Cybergym

Now we have already given you an impression of how you are received and introduced at Towermax Fitness and how much fun it is to use. Now we want to give you a little peek behind the scenes of the one-man project.

Towermax Fitness is a kind of service from Sromline and actually from Sven. He puts his heart and soul behind the whole development and distribution. So he is currently making himself personally available on site in Unterentfelden for those who are interested.

Towermax Fitness was launched in 2017 as a private project by Sven, so the demand was still manageable. In July 2018, a completely revised version was released, followed shortly afterwards by the member area, with various additional functions such as your own track list, interval, heart rate sensor and training statistics. The training tower is a kind of training device and intended as a supplementary training for martial artists or simply for a good time training.

He has been to martial arts and combat sports centres several times with all the VR equipment. He did this for free because he was interested in people testing it and getting feedback. In such tests, the biggest difficulty has been the time factor. Everybody is really enthusiastic and that's how everybody who watches first, and usually there are a lot of people, wants to test it. The coolest location so far has been a real boxing ring.

He himself used to do martial arts, but has not been active for a long time. It is exciting to see how the different styles have their difficulties: "The boxers often put the controllers too close to their faces because they are used to keeping their guard that way. The karatekas pull the controller back too close to the flank. So far it has worked best with kickboxers. But basically all styles can keep up well. With non-martial artists, however, it's a different story," Sven tells us. Apparently, people without martial arts backgrounds, even fitness trainers, are overwhelmed with the movements. He has already received e-mails saying that it is much too difficult. That's why people can't use the fitness application.

Sven's private project has no financial goals and therefore the licence or membership can be used free of charge in the home application without restrictions. The prerequisite is VR equipment with position tracking: HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. Foot trackers for kicking are now also supported (HTC Vive only). Towermax is a website and is developed with the WebXR Framework. Aframe created. It runs best in the Supermedium Browser.

Most visitors to the tower come from Supermedium. When asked what a manageable demand was, Sven replied: "There are just under 4000 visitors who have visited the tower in VR since July 2018. I didn't collect visitor statistics before that. About 15-20% have been active for more than 20 minutes."

In the beginning, there were various visualisations. However, he quickly realised that this did not bring any added value. "People are already so busy with the actual gameplay that they don't have time to pay attention to them. That's why I left it out again."

His next goal is to be able to provide even more sound so that players can get up to 100h of music pleasure from the current 6h.

It's nice to see people like this who open up access to VR for very different target groups so generously.

As part of Cybergym.ch, he also offers various VR sports activities in the House of Dance for a fee in addition to Towermax. This is mainly for those who do not have their own VR equipment. For example, there is a VR fitness tour where various activities can be tried out.

Take a look! It's worth it!