Peloton For The Pool - Form Goggles

By: Joe Trusty - Pool Magazine

Form smart swim goggles are the first swimming goggles with a heads up display. This revolutionary new smart goggle is taking the swim world by storm. We recently had the chance to have an in-depth interview with the Founder and CEO of Form, Dan Eisenhardt.

Eisenhardt, who hails from a family of swimmers in Aalborg, Denmark - has always had a passion for swimming. In fact, he swam competitively himself winning NJCAA All-American honors at Indian River College.

Coming up with a superior product in the swim goggle space is an objective Eisenhardt considered his personal mission to achieve.

A feeling the stars had finally aligned for this type of product would inevitably be what propelled the innovation that has become Form.

The product represents an incredible leap forward with advancements in the field of Augmented Reality (AR) technology which have finally made their way to the swimming pool.

“I always thought the killer app for swimming was AR because there was no alternatives,” said Eisenhardt, “there is nothing in swimming that can give you the real time information without the tradeoffs.”

Building the ultimate app for swimmers would involve finding the right people to help execute in the application design.

When you talk about AR, it’s a completely new category. It’s more of the killer app that runs on the hardware, or the business model. Here we’re still early on in AR, it’s taken a long time because it’s a difficult problem to solve.”

Many experts feel early AR devices like Google Glass failed because of the social stigma of wearable tech. Beyond that, the overall look and feel of the technology created a usability matrix of problems for Form to solve with their product.

It was through iteration prototyping that Eisenhardt would come up with the perfect balance for the Form swim goggles.

Determining what was feasible was important, “Figuring out how much information we show when you’re swimming and dumbing it down so that it doesn’t distract you was important,” said Eisenhardt.

The challenge of putting technology in front of people’s eyes had constraints beyond mere engineering hurdles. Getting the device to spit back the real-time metrics that was important to swimmers was something Eisenhardt worked painstakingly to get right.

“Typically you want to be able to see your pace per 100, how fast you’re swimming, how far you’ve gone, a length counter or lap counter,” said Eisenhardt.

Already being considered a revolution in swimming technology by competitive swimmers; the googles allow swimmers to see how they perform over time. “You want to be able to see your split times so you can compare current length over the last length, your heart rate, and so forth,” explained Eisenhardt. The product has a nineaxis sensor in the goggles, combining an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer into the wearable device.

Form swim goggles allow for custom configurations based on the data you want to see in real-time with three different contexts including Swimming, Stroking, and Turning. These aspects allow different data sets of information to appear on the heads-up display as they occur.

All of this data allows swimmers to have better visibility of their stats in the pool. Getting that data in real time is something that has never been done before. The device is being touted as the swim coach’s assistant, given that the 10,000-foot data the goggles provide gives trainers better insight into swimmer performance.

Read the entire article...