"Nike+ Kinect Training is as good as a real trainer and costs less than 1hr's lesson." - Chris Anderson: Former Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine

At the Nike campus, athletes like LeBron James use cutting-edge facilities and training techniques to understand their capabilities and push their game higher.

Our challenge was to bring this same training innovation to everyone, by putting a Nike personal trainer into every home.

We began by merging Nike’s knowledge of training and sports science with Microsoft’s Kinect tracking technology.

The training had to be truly authentic, so we built custom tools in order to create our workout content. To bring premium Nike training facilities to life, we modified the CryENGINE 3 game engine. To enable best-in-class motion sensing, we rebuilt Kinect’s vision libraries to enhance the performance of the camera.

Utilising these enhancements and Nike’s training philosophies, every user receives a unique workout program with real-time corrective feedback, whenever they train.

After a two-year journey we released Nike+ Kinect Training for Xbox 360, bringing a Nike personal trainer to homes everywhere.

To recreate the closest thing to a real personal trainer, we collaborated with Nike’s master trainers. We distilled that expertise into logical rules to recreate the training experience in a console game, pushing the technology to new limits to achieve a truly effective way of getting fit and staying fit.

Representing the user:

To immerse the user in the experience and mirror their performance, we envisaged their bodies as fluid clusters of points in space, which double as performance indicators. We took depth information from the infrared laser and projected it into the scene. From a blocky grid with significant lag, we refined to match our visual target and deliver on our vision.

Guidance:

Real-time guidance and motivation are at the heart of Nike training sessions. With inspiration from Nike trainers we identified form errors for correction and incorporated them into scripts for coaching drills.

We created 3D skeletal keyframes from the performance-captured drills, and linked each motion to VO responses. This enabled instant coaching for each drill, motivation throughout a 30min workout and drove our 4-week program to adapt to the user’s progress.

Floor exercises:

Nike trainers developed workout sessions underpinned by floor exercises. Existing technology could not distinguish between a person lying down and the floor they were on. We drove advances in computer vision, developing techniques to enable floor-based drills for the first time.

Fuel Print:

To deliver the ultimate in motivation; measurable proof of progress, we created the first universal benchmark of fitness. Our software distilled years of fitness-testing knowledge into a standardised test, which we normalised using data from hundreds of consumers.

These key innovations were brought to life on Xbox 360. We built cloud services to provide workout information on mobile and crafted a multi-platform app to maintain the trainer-user connection.

Our objective was to give everyone access to their own personal trainer, creating a new service for Nike and a new relationship between brand and consumer.

In the short time following release, Nike+ Kinect Training became the #1 selling Kinect title of holiday 2012.

Nike+ Kinect Training is an expandable training platform. After launch we conducted consumer research. Based on feedback, we created and released through downloadable content an entirely new set of workouts that would seamlessly integrate in the user’s workout program.

Tracking progress is the number one motivator for athletes. So we built an entirely new measure of fitness called Fuel Print. Fuel Print represents your fitness makeup. You can pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses, and compare yourself to athletes everywhere. This platform can act independently, and take on a life beyond Nike+ Kinect Training, becoming a universal benchmark for athletic fitness.