Peloton recently held their annual “hackathon” event – a week-long event dedicated to unlocking creativity and pushing boundaries across the company’s global teams.
For those unfamiliar, a hackathon is an event at which individuals or teams come together to brainstorm, design, and develop creative solutions, often within a short, intense timeframe. Hackathons encourage rapid innovation and experimentation, allowing participants to think outside their usual roles and work in teams to bring their ideas to life.
Peloton gave an overview of this year’s hackathon – which was the company’s 7th since its founding. In doing so, they shared that previous hackathon events have eventually led to features such as auto-resistance, third party treadmill metrics, target metrics, the Peloton Guide, QR code log-in, and the Peloton Android Widget.
Peloton instructors also got involved during the week, with both Alex Karwoski and Matt Wilpers shown in images from throughout the event.
One of the projects this year seems to be a virtual cycling game – where users see an avatar move on screen based on their cycling. As a reminder, Peloton has previously announced they will be beta testing a virtual cycling game – which we have shared appears to be a Zwift-style cycling game & training platform.
In the game seen in the hackathon, it appears the goal is to operate a rickshaw taxi bike, and earn money by moving passengers between locations. If we had to guess – this demo project might be using the core graphics & engine of the upcoming Zwift-style beta game, but with a different gameplay system created for the hackathon. In other words – the project made during this week could have taken the beta game and changed the gamification to add the money/taxi system instead of what will be released for the public beta game.
Another game that appears to have been created for the hackathon was a more Mario-style game – with a bike moving in a 2 dimensional world as you cycle.
Yet another project from this year appears to show a variation of Peloton Lanebreak that doesn’t necessarily require a Bike or Tread (or partially takes place off the device). Rather than the avatar being a tire – there is a human looking avatar. A Peloton team member is shown moving in place as the avatar moves on the screen. Instead of earning points by changing speed or incline, in this version, it appears you earn points by doing different cardio movements – for example, the screen is prompting the user to do jumping jacks.
What isn’t clear from this photo is whether this is a true Augmented Reality game – where a camera is actually tracking the user and only awarding points for correctly done movements. This would be similar to the Peloton Guide Movement Tracker feature – and could possibly see that technology integrated into the Lanebreak style game.
An important caveat to these – although some previous hackathon projects over the last 7 years have made it to the Peloton platform – many have not. So the existence of these projects and demos does not necessarily mean it will lead to anything a Peloton member will ever end up seeing on their own devices.
Peloton’s 2024 hackathon event saw over 50 projects showcased. The features were developed in just three and a half days – with some teams working through the night. The company said:
“This year, we had 55 completed projects from 198 hackers, representing teams across Product, Emerging Business, Engineering, Legal, Instructors and other groups across the company. Many of these hackers pushed themselves to learn something new working outside of their core job / skill set. The excitement during the week is contagious, in part coming from members of competing teams and organizational boundaries helping each other achieve the best possible outcomes.”
The projects were first voted on by Peloton team members, and top entries moving on to a “Shark Tank” style final pitch. In total, 8,648 votes helped select the five finalist projects, where Lead Team judges evaluated the projects & features live on the main stage.
Would you be interested in seeing any of these features make it to your Peloton devices or app?
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