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Level Home emerges from stealth with $71M from Walmart and Lennar and a new take on the smart lock
As companies like Google, Amazon and Apple hone their strategies to build the brain that helps you use the smart home of the future, where a new wave of internet-enabled appliances, climate and security systems and other connected objects can be connected and controlled through their hubs, a new smart home startup called Level Home is emerging from stealth today with a big packet of funding, a sales deal, and a hope of bringing something new to the table, by focusing on ways of rethinking old things you own already, starting with the lock on your front door.
The Level Lock, its first patented product, is a system — tested for durability, powered by a basic CR2 battery (average life: one year), equipped with ANSI GRADE 1/A security and encryption — that is fitted into the existing dead bolt on your door to make it “smart”.
Level Home says you can install the Lock yourself using a basic number-two screwdriver — “the most common tool in the American home”, says CEO and co-founder John Martin — or you can engage Level Home’s installation partner, HelloTech, to set it up.
The key thing (heh) with the Level Lock is that you door will not look any different after you install it. But linking it up with HomeKit, you can then use an Apple iPhone or Watch to unlock it (or, you can also still use the physical keys that come with the lock to open the door). Through the app, you can then also provide one-off or repeat access to others and monitor who comes and goes.
“We like to think of this as the first invisible smart lock,” Martin said in an interview. “Why would we take the things away that matter, that are a part of who you are such as the look of your home, just in the name of tech? We have to do a better job of bringing technology into your house, in a way that preserves it as your home.”
Priced at $249 when it goes on direct sale (first in the US), the Lock is available now for preorder on Level Home’s site. But when the Lock does become generally available, you will be able to get it in more places beyond Level Home’s site, and at a lower price.
That’s because, along with the launch of the Level Lock and the company itself, Level Home is also announcing that it has raised $71 million in funding in the years that it has been in stealth.
Investors include a firm called Hut 8 Ventures (not connected to Hut 8 cryptocurrency mining, I’m told), Lennar Homes — the home builder that has worked with the likes of Apple and Amazon to incorporate connected features into new properties, and is a prolific investor in startups focused on the next generation of homes — and Walmart.
The retail giant has been working double time to “level up” to Amazon on the e-commerce front, building a range of services online and increasing the ways in which it can connect with shoppers beyond visits to its large retail locations, and while Level Home is not disclosing any details yet on how it will work with its strategic investors, you could imagine its involvement having more than one touchpoint.
It could be a very strong sales channel for the Level Lock through its many well-visited retail locations.
But it could also be sold potentially as part of a bigger service offering, in competition with something like Amazon Key, where Walmart offers smart locks to its customers as part of a bigger home delivery business.
Walmart started down this road back in 2017, when it first partnered with smart lock maker August to test in-home delivery. Today — Level Home’s launch was timed to coincide with this, it seems — Walmart is taking that out of the test phase with the launch of InHome Delivery.
Going live first in Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Vero Beach, Walmart has chosen Level Lock as its key partner for door locks, installing locks for customers at a price of $49 so that Walmart delivery people can bring items you’ve purchased or pick up those you’re returning even when you are not at home. (The service itself costs $19.99 per month for membership and if you opt for garage delivery you’re sold a different lock, from GoControl.)
“We’re pleased to make an investment in Level Home as they unveil their latest technology, the Level Lock,” said Ashley Hubka, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Development and Partnerships, Walmart, in a statement. “Smart technology products and home automation provide us with more opportunities to serve customers in new ways today and into the future.”
Partnerships with the likes of Walmart and Lennar sound like a big deal, considering that the company hasn’t tested its product or brand in the market, and the area of smart home hardware is also very crowded already.
Part of the reason for the leap may be because of the background of the founders. John Martin (CEO) and Ken Goto (CTO) have worked together for decades across a range of major tech and other consumer companies including Microsoft, Starbucks and Apple. Underneath them, they have assembled a wider team of about 50 of like-minded people to bring that vision into the physical world.
“Much of the current company are people from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook and others,” said Goto. “We have a shared level of talent and capability.”
To be very clear, Martin and Goto are very far from the image of young startup-hopefuls. Martin told me he didn’t even really like the term “startup.” Instead, the two are taking a measured and very confident approach to the bigger task of thinking about how to approach a new generation of hardware.
For them, it isn’t so much as “disrupting” what is already being used, as it is trying to augment it to bring in a wider population of adopters beyond those who embrace the cutting edge of tech.
“We could have made anything for the connected home, so and we thought for weeks about what to invent,” Martin told me about the pair’s decision to focus first on the front door lock three years ago.
“We had a couple of fundamentals: we wanted products for everyday life, and we didn’t want home automation out of the mainline of what normally happens. We didn’t want lightbulbs to change color for the sake of it, and we didn’t want to appeal just to the tech professional. So we thought entry was the right point to start.”
Or, you could say entry was a good point of entry.
Of course, Level Home isn’t the first to cotton onto this progression of logic. Smart doors and smart locks are everywhere now and have been one of the biggest areas of “smart home” hardware — although ironically, they are not being used all that much.
“When we looked at first generation smart locks, we were offended by how aggressively the experience was departing from how people use locks today.” By this, Martin is referring to things like physical keys, or aesthetically pleasing doors and locks without large electronic objects attached to them.
Indeed, the smart home market has not been a home run so far, but it shows some promise. Overall, smart home devices are services are projected to generate revenues of nearly $74 million this year, nearly doubling to $141 billion by 2023. A stream of hardware sales will underpin that growth, with some 140 million smart locks and other home security devices — the second-biggest category after video entertainment — expected to be shipped this year, growing to 352 million by 2023 globally.
But within that, penetration has not been massive. In Europe, only around 11% of homes have smart home devices in them (not counting phones). In the US, the figure is only slightly higher, at 15%. That speaks to a still-nascent market, but also the fact that many people’s imaginations, and crucially wallets, have get to be captured by what is on offer today.
That spells opportunity for the smart home entrepreneurs, and investors willing to take the leap to back them.
Martin and Goto said that they have a pipeline of several other products that they will be working on, although for now, they are keeping quiet on what those might be.
I’ve searched and can only so far find patents for the Lock system, but the two tell me that the basic idea will be to continue presenting alternative versions of the smart home: to quietly make our lives at home easier and more connected, but without any massively perceptible shifts on the outside, or none that wouldn’t feel natural to the average user.
What might that mean? That could be more “smartening” of dumb things in the way that Level Home has done with the dead bolt, or potentially a kind of skeuomorphic approach, but for physical objects (maybe even in a tip of the hat to their early Apple pedigree). Move slow, don’t break things.
In a market with a lot of options for how to bring more modern objects into the mix that genuinely look like the future, this could be a good differentiator.
“Level Home’s unique approach and technology is a game changer for homebuilders,” said Eric Feder, Managing General Partner, Lennar Ventures, in a statement. “As one of the nation’s leading home builders, Lennar is founded on a long tradition of quality craftsmanship and attention to detail. The Level Lock will transform the smart lock category by allowing home builders to offer innovation without having to compromise on their home experience.”
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With $15M round and 100K tablets sold, reMarkable CEO wants to make tech ‘more human’
The reMarkable tablet is a strange device in this era of ultra-smart gadgets: A black and white screen meant for reading, writing, and sketching — and nothing more. Yet the company has sold 100,000 of the devices and now has attracted $15 million in series A funding from Spark Capital.
It’s an unusual trajectory for a hardware startup exploring a nearly unoccupied market, but CEO Magnus Wanberg is confident that’s because this category of device is destined to grow in response to increasingly invasive tech. Sometimes an anti-technology trend is the tech opportunity of a lifetime.
I reviewed the reMarkable last year and compared it with its only real competition, the Sony Digital Paper Tablet. It was launched not on Kickstarter or Indiegogo but with its own independent crowdfunding campaign — and considering we’ve seen devices like this attempt such a thing and either let down or rip off their backers, that alone was a significant risk.
The device has been a runaway success, though, selling over 100,000 units — and attracting investment in the process. When I talked with Wanberg and co-founder Gerst about their new A round, the conversation was so interesting that I decided to publish it in full (or at least slightly edited).
How did they get here? What would they have done differently? Is the threat of the “smart” world really a thing? Why fight tech with more tech?
Devin: So you guys raised some money, that’s great! But it’s been a while since we talked. I think it’s important to hear about the progress of unique companies that are doing interesting things. So first can you tell me a little about what the company’s been busy with?
Magnus: Well, we’ve created this wonderful product, the reMarkable paper tablet. We’ve been very focused on that effort, based on a love for paper and a love for technology, to see if we can find some ways to join these two together to help people think better. That’s sort of the the whole ethos of the company.
So for the last six years, we’ve just been grinding away… you know, we’re a small player up against the big guys on this. So we’ve been sort of fighting guerrilla warfare trying to trying to establish ourselves.
And we were successful, fortunately, when we did our pre-order campaign, because as we found out, we weren’t the only ones who who love this notion of thinking better with the paper tablet, seeing paper as a powerful tool for thinking and for creating.
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MyMilk Labs launches Mylee, a small sensor that analyzes breast milk at home
Many expectant mothers are told that breastfeeding will come naturally, but it is often a fraught and confusing experience, especially during the first few weeks after birth. Parents often worry about if their babies are getting enough nutrition or if they are producing enough milk. MyMilk Labs wants to give nursing mothers more information with Mylee, a sensor that scans a few drops of breast milk to get information about its composition and connects to a mobile app. The Israel-based company presented today at Disrupt Battlefield as one of two wild card competitors picked from Startup Alley.
The Mylee launched at Disrupt with a pre-order price of $249 (its regular retail price is $349). Based in Israel, MyMilk Labs was founded in 2014 by Ravid Schecter and Sharon Haramati, who met while working on PhDs in neuroimmunology and neurobiology, respectively, at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
During the company’s stage presentation, Schecter said the device is meant to give mothers and lactation consultants objective information about breast milk.
Breast milk changes in the first days and weeks after birth, progressing from colostrum to mature milk. Mylee scans the electrochemical properties of milk and then correlates that to data points based on MyMilk Labs’ research to calculate where the sample is on the continuum, then tells mothers if their milk is “delayed” or “advanced,” relative to the time that has passed since they gave birth.
The device’s first version is currently in a beta pilot with lactation consultants who have used them to scan milk samples from 500 mothers.
MyMilk Labs already has consumer breast milk testing kits that enable mothers to provide a small sample at home that is then sent to MyMilk Labs’ laboratories for analysis. One is a nutritional panel that gives information about the milk’s levels of vitamins B6, B12 and A, calories and fat percentage, along with dietary recommendations for the mother. Another panel focuses on what is causing breast pain, a frequent complaint for nursing mothers. It tests for bacterial or fungal infections and gives antibiotic suggestions depending on what strains are detected.
Though some doctors believe testing kits are unnecessary for the majority of nursing mothers, there is demand for more knowledge about breastfeeding, as demonstrated by the line-up of breast milk testing kits from MyMilk Labs and competitors like Lactation Labs, Everly Well and Happy Vitals. Haramati said on stage that MyMilk Labs plans to eventually transfer some of the tests’ capabilities to the Mylee.
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OmniVis could save lives by detecting cholera-infected water in minutes rather than days
Clean drinking water is one of the most urgent needs in developing countries and disaster-stricken areas, but safety tests can take days — during which tainted water can infect thousands. OmniVis aims to make detection of cholera and other pathogens as quick, simple, and cheap as a pregnancy test. Its smartphone-powered detection platform could save thousands of lives.
OmniVis, which presented on stage at Disrupt SF’s Startup Battlefield today, emerged from research conducted at Purdue University, where CEO and co-founder Katherine Clayton completed her doctorate. She and her advisors were working on the question of using microfluidics, basically very close inspection of the behavior of fluids, to detect cholera bacteria in water.
In case you forgot your Infectious Diseases 101, cholera is a bacterium that thrives in water polluted by fecal matter. When ingested it multiplies and causes severe diarrhea and dehydration — which as you might imagine can become a life-threatening problem if a community is short on clean water.
While normally uncommon, there was a huge cholera outbreak in Haiti in 2010 following a major earthquake there; 665,000 people were infected and more than 8,000 people died. It was this humanitarian disaster that prompted Clayton to look into how such an event might have been prevented. She’s been working on what would become the OmniVis platform since 2013.
“It’s been a long time coming,” she told me.
That’s not uncommon for academic spin-offs with valuable IP but zero product experience. Moving from lab bench to field-ready hardware has taken years of hard work. But the resulting device could upend a costly and slow water testing process that leaves communities at risk in crucial moments.
Existing water testing is generally done at a central location, a lab run by a university, utility, or the local government. It depends on the region — and of course if there has been a disaster, it may not even be functional. Going from sample collection to results may take several days, and it isn’t cheap, either. Clayton estimated it at $100 per sample.
“But that’s just supplies and labor,” she said. “Not the cost of the lab, the PCR machines — which are tens of thousands of dollars — the pipettes, the dyes, the disposables and consumables, the training… not to mention in a lot of areas you’re not just going to walk by a nice central laboratory. Some countries may only have one or two testing facilities.”
Another option is disposable rapid diagnostic tests, more like pregnancy tests than anything, meant for use with stool samples — but their accuracy is low even then, and with cholera diluted in a water source you may as well be flipping a coin.
Such was the state of testing when Haiti had its outbreak and Clayton began looking into it. In 2013 they began investigating microfluidics as a method for detection. It works by exposing a set of chemical reagents, or “primers,” to a water sample. These primers are engineered to bind to bits of cholera’s DNA and then when heated, replicate it — a process called DNA amplification.
The more cholera is present, the more DNA will be available to amplify, and it multiplies to the point where it affects the viscosity of the water — a factor that can be tested by the device. Interestingly, the device in no way “analyzes” the DNA or identifies it; all it does is measure how viscous the water is, which is a highly reliable proxy for how much cholera was present in it to begin with.
It turns out this method is both quick and accurate: In 30 minutes it gives as good or better results as central testing.
“The worst thing we could ever do is say there’s no cholera in the water when there is,” Clayton said. So they’re focused on robust test results over all else. But ultimately the device still had to go from the lab to the real world. To that end the team conducted pilot tests in Haiti, where they worked with local NGOs and communities to get some direct feedback.
What they found was promising — but also resulted in major changes to the product. For one thing, they had to switch from iPhone to Android.
“People feel safer with Android than iPhone, which is considered a luxury item,” Clayton said. They also found that men and women operated the system equally well — the team is 84 percent women, she noted, and their design choices may have crept into the product the same as can happen on what is much more common, a male-dominated team. English and Svengali users likewise did fine. Interestingly, locals were baffled by roman numerals. “That was surprising,” she said, but illustrative of how even the smallest assumptions need to be questioned.
“I love user-centered design,” Clayton said. “I think it’s the only way to get engineering to work. UX and graphic design is not my or my colleagues’ specialty, so we had to get some outside contractors for that.”
The production device, which OmniVis hopes to ship in about six months, should cost around a thousand dollars — but at about $10 per test it will pay for itself quickly, especially considering how much easily it can be deployed and used. A half-hour turnaround on a test that can be performed by an aid worker with an hour’s training is an invaluable tool in a disaster-stricken area where infrastructure like mail and roads may be in disorder.
These devices, by the way, are not bought and paid for by the people who drink the water. Like the water-testing labs, they’ll be owned and operated by NGOs, governments and others with budgets for this kind of thing.
Cholera is the first pathogen the company is aiming to detect, but the system can just as easily detect several others simply by using different disposable tests equipped with different primers. E. Coli could be next — with the proper testing, Clayton said. And others would follow. It’s not hard to imagine an OmniVis device being a must-have for any relief work where water needs to be tested.
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HTC’s new CEO Yves Maitre is coming to Disrupt San Francisco
Earlier this month, HTC co-founder Cher Wang stepped down from her role as CEO. In her place, former Orange EVP Yves Maitre has taken up the reins for the Taipei-based smartphone maker.
One of Maitre’s first acts as the head of HTC will be to join us at Disrupt in October. The interview — and his new role — comes at a tenuous time for HTC. The company has been harder hit than most by several years of stagnant smartphone sales.
In spite of a $1.1 billion deal in 2017 that gave Google access to most of the Taiwanese company’s R&D resources, the following year still saw massive layoffs. All the while, it has looked to emerging technologies like VR and blockchain as a potential way forward in an oversaturated market. In his first public interview, Maitre will discuss how HTC got here and what the company can and will do to help turn the ship around.
Maitre joins an incredible speaker lineup, which includes Steph Curry, Rachel Haurwitz from Caribou Bioscience, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoox’s Aicha Evans. Still need tickets? You can pick those up right here.
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Apple’s iOS and iPadOS 13 support multiple PS4 or Xbox One controllers, which could be huge for Arcade
Apple’s iOS 13 update (and the newly renamed iPadOS for iPad hardware) both support multiple simultaneous Bluetooth game controller connections. Apple added Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controller support in the updates, and after doing some digging, I can confirm that you can use multiple of either type of controller on one iOS device running the update, with each controlling a different player character.
That’s the good news: The bad news is that not many games take advantage of this right now. I wasn’t able to find a game in Apple’s new Arcade subscription service to try this out, for instance — and even finding a non-Arcade iOS game took a bit of digging. I finally was able to try local multi-controller multiplayer with “Horde,” a free-to-play two-player co-op brawler, and found that it worked exactly as you’d expect.
With Arcade, Apple has done more to re-invigorate the App Store, and gaming on iOS in particular, than it has since the original launch of the iPhone. The all-you-can-game subscription offering, which delivers extremely high-quality gaming experiences without ads or in-app purchases, has already impressed me immensely with the breadth and depth of its launch slate, which includes fantastic titles like “Where Cards Fall,” “Skate,” “Sayonara: Wild Hearts” and “What the Golf,” to name just a few.
Combine the quality and value of the library with cross-play on iOS, iPadOS, Apple TV and eventually Mac devices, and you have a killer combo that’s well-positioned to eat up a lot of the gaming market currently owned by Nintendo’s Switch and other home consoles.
Local multiplayer, especially on iPads, is another potential killer feature here. Already, iPad owners are likely to be using their tablets both at home and on the road, and providing quality local gaming experiences on that big display, with just the added requirement that you pack a couple of PS4 or Xbox controllers in your suitcase or carry-on, opens up a lot of potential value for device owners.
As I said above, there’s not much in the way of games that support this right now, but it’s refreshing to know that the features are there for when game developers want to take advantage.
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North now offers Focals smart glasses fittings and purchases via app
North’s Focals smart glasses are the first in the category to even approach mainstream appeal, but to date, the only way to get a pair has been to go into a physical North showroom and get a custom fitting, then return once they’re ready for a pickup and final adjustment. Now, North has released its Showroom app, which makes Focals available across the U.S. and Canada without an in-person appointment.
This approach reduces considerable friction, and it’s able to do so thanks to technology available on board the iPhone X or later — essentially the same tech that makes Face ID possible. People can go through the sizing and fitting process using these later model iPhones (and you can borrow a friend’s if you’re on Android or an older iOS device) and then North takes those measurements and can produce either prescription or non-prescription Focals, shipped directly to your door after a few weeks.
The Showroom app also includes an AR-powered virtual try-on feature for making sure you like the look of the frames, and for picking out your favorite color. Once the Focals show up at your door, the final fitting process is also something you can do at home, guided by the app’s directions for getting the fit just right.
Should you still want to hit an actual physical showroom, North’s still going to be operating its Brooklyn and Toronto storefronts, and will be operating pop-ups across North America as well.
Focals began shipping earlier this year, bringing practical smart notification, guidance and other software experiences to your field of view via a tiny projector and in-lens transparent display. North, which previously existed as Thalmic Labs and created the Myo gesture control armband, recognized that they were building control devices optimized for exactly this kind of application, but also found that no one was yet getting wearable tech like smart glasses right. Last year, Thalmic Labs pivoted to become North and focus on Focals as a result.
Since launching its smart glasses to consumers, it’s been iterating the software to consistently add new features, and making them more accessible to customers. An early price drop significantly lessened sticker shock, and now removing the requirement to actually visit a location in person to both order and collect the glasses should help expand their customer base further still.
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DxOMark’s night and wide-angle camera tests push today’s smartphones to their limits
Sure, you could take Apple’s word for it that the new iPhone’s cameras are amazing — or you could let some obsessive pixel-peepers perform some (mostly) objective tests and really get into the nitty-gritty. Pixel peepers in extraordinary DxOMark are here to help, with new tests focused on evaluating the latest gadgets’ night modes and ultra-wide-angle lenses.
The site’s already extensive image quality tests cover the usual aspects of a smartphone camera — color representation, exposure, noise, all that. But the latest devices are making advances in new directions that aren’t adequately covered by those tests; namely, the emergence of “night mode” shooting and multi-lens setups like the iPhone 11 Pro and its hulking rear-camera assembly.
Therefore, the tests must change! And DxOMark has begun including extremely nitpicky breakdowns of camera performance in the particularly difficult circumstances of extreme low light and extreme wide-angle photography.
Night shots are graded on detail, noise, color reproduction — the kinds of things that tend to be lost in low light. Wide-angle shots are graded on distortion, detail throughout the frame and chromatic aberration — all difficult to correct for.
Some devices may be great in one area but poor in another, for example trading too much detail for lower noise in a night shot but getting great color. A higher score may indicate a better overall camera, but if you care about your phone photography you should look into what goes into that score as well. I for one never plan to use these ultra-wide cameras, so I can ignore that category altogether!
Now, this is an interesting area to grade such cameras in, and difficult one, because so much of the work is being done in software. As I’ve noted, the future (and of course the present) of photography is code, and without code there would be no night mode or ultra-wide-angle shots.
The image stacking and denoising that allow low-light photography, and the speed of things like perspective correction and other tricks that allow a nearly fisheye lens to look relatively normal, are consequences of massive improvements in image processing efficiency and huge jumps in processing power. And they’ll only get better, even for a given camera-sensor-processor combo.
So DxOMark may find itself revising these scores — which are themselves being mapped retroactively onto reviews already posted: Low-light performance is replacing the flash performance category, and wide angle is a new score.
The first phones to get the new treatment are the Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10+, the Huawei P30 Pro, a handful of others and, of course, the new iPhones. No doubt the upcoming Pixel 4 will be a contender as well, especially in the night mode category.
It’s good to know someone is systematically testing these aspects of phones with a critical eye. Watch for the updated tests and listings on DxOMark starting today.
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FarmWise and its weed-pulling agribot harvest $14.5M in funding
Automating agriculture is a complex proposition given the number and variety of tasks involved, but a number of robotics and autonomy companies are giving it their best shot. FarmWise seems to have impressed someone — it just raised $14.5 million to continue development of its autonomous weeding vehicle.
Currently in the prototype stage, these vehicles look like giant lumbering personnel carriers or the like, but are in fact precision instruments which scan the ground for invasive weeds among the crop and carefully pluck them out.
“Each day, one FarmWise robot can weed crops to feed a medium-sized city of approximately 400,000 inhabitants,” said FarmWise CEO Sebastien Boyer in a press release announcing the latest funding round. “We are now enhancing the scale and depth of our proprietary plant-detection technology to help growers with more of their processes and on more of their crops.”
Presumably the robot was developed and demonstrated with something of a specialty in one crop or another, more as a proof of concept than anything.
Well, it seems to have proved the concept. The new $14.5 million round, led by Calibrate Ventures, is likely due to the success of these early trials. This is far from an easy problem, so going from idea to nearly market-ready in under three years is pretty impressive. Farmers love tech — if it works. And tiny issues or error rates can lead to enormous problems with the vast monoculture fields that make up the majority of U.S. farms.
The company previously took in about $5.7 million in a seed round, following its debut on Alchemist Accelerator’s demo day back in 2017. Robots are expensive!
Hopefully the cash infusion will help propel FarmWise from prototype to commercialization, though it’s hard to imagine they could build more than a handful of the machines with that kind of money. Perhaps they’ll line up a couple big orders and build on that future revenue.
Meanwhile they’ll continue to develop the AI that powers the chunky, endearing vehicles.
“Looking ahead, our robots will increasingly act as specialized doctors for crops, monitoring individual health and adjusting targeted interventions according to a crop’s individual needs,” said Boyer. So not only will these lumbering platforms delicately remove weeds, but they’ll inspect for aphids and fungus and apply the necessary remedies.
With that kind of inspection they can make a data play later — what farmer wouldn’t want to be able to digitally inspect every plant in their fields?
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Nintendo shows off exercise-powered RPG for Switch, Ring Fit Adventure
Nintendo has been at the crossroads of video games and fitness since the famous Power Pad for the NES, and the Switch is the latest to receive a game powered by physical activity: Ring Fit Adventure. And it actually looks fun!
In the game, you’ll jog in place to advance your character, and perform various movements and exercises to avoid obstacles and defeat enemies. Your quest is to defeat an “evil body-building dragon” who has disrupted the peaceful, apparently very fit world of the protagonist. Sure.
The game comes with a pair of accessories: a ring and leg strap, each of which you slot a Joy-Con into. The two controllers work together to get a picture of your whole body movement, meaning it can be sure you’re keeping your arms out in front of you when you do a squat, and not phoning it in during leg raises.
The ring itself is flexible and can tell how hard you’re squeezing or pulling it— but don’t worry, it can be calibrated for your strength level.
Interestingly, the top button of the controller appears to be able to be used as a heart-rate monitor. That kind of came out of left field, but I like it. Just one more way Nintendo is making its hardware do interesting new things.
There look to be a ton of different movements you’ll be required to do, focusing on different areas of the body: upper, lower, core and some sort of whole-body ones inspired by yoga positions. Ingeniously, some enemies are weak to one or another, and you’ll need to use different ones for other scenarios, so you’re getting a varied workout whether you like it or not.
Meanwhile, your character levels up and unlocks new, more advanced moves — think a lunge instead of a squat, or adding an arm movement to a leg one — and you can get closer to the goal.
There are also minigames and straight-up workouts you can select, which you can do at any time if you don’t feel like playing the actual game, and contribute to your character’s level anyway.
The idea of gamifying fitness has been around for quite a while, and some titles, like Wii Fit, actually got pretty popular. But this one seems like the most in-depth actual game to use fitness as its main mechanic, and critically it is simple and easy enough that even the most slothful among us can get in a session now and then at our own pace.
Ring Fit Adventure will be available October 18 — no pricing yet, but you can probably expect it to be a little above an ordinary Switch game.
You can watch the full-length walkthrough of the game below, but beware — the acting is a little off-putting.
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