The Supernatural Diaries — Week Four
The team nears the home stretch of their 30-day challenge
One part Beat Saber, one part National Geographic, and one part Peloton, Supernatural is a VR workout subscription service aims to provide a more guided, tailored experience for the home exercise enthusiast through coaching, integration with heart rate trackers, and popular music.
Coinciding with the app’s launch (and free 30-day trial) three NoPro staff members — a competitive Beat Saber player (Will Cherry) and two casual players (Noah Nelson and Kathryn Yu) — with Oculus Quest headsets embarked on a fitness journey with the new software.
Will they finally hit their stride? Or will they give up on the app? And will Will Cherry ever return?
Catch up with previous entries:
DAY TWENTY TWO — MAY 16, 2020
Will, Session Twelve
I’m back. I’m sorry I took a week away. I took a new job, and while I love it, it certainly does not love me. I didn’t get the chance to cook, recreate, or sleep well, let alone work out. But I’m back for this final week. The last hurrah.
And honestly, I missed Supernatural. I miss the challenge of new songs and the flow of the movements. It was easier than Beat Saber, yet substituted for a HIIT workout when there’s nothing else in this quarantine. I wanted to jump back in, but when I did, I remembered why it frustrated me.
I did three workouts today, to get back in the groove. And they went fine, really. A few new songs, some classic bangers. WITHIN is adding new ones to the mix slowly, and it’s much appreciated. I think a couple fixes were added in a recent patch, and I didn’t notice any hung up loading screens this time. Even the bats felt a little longer. Just a bit.
But I’ll be damned if I miss targets because of Oculus Quest tracking. I really want to test a beta build of Supernatural with Oculus Rift CV1 or SteamVR, just to make me blame the hardware and not the software. I don’t know any more. What I do know is that I “miss” targets (black ones, suspiciously) when I go right through them. But I digress.
After three workouts, I still wanted more. Sure, I was frustrated, but I wanted to work harder. I wanted strength training. I miss free weights and barbells. Quarantine is getting to me.
But even though I missed Supernatural and I’m going to finish this week, I still don’t know about subscribing past quarantine. The new yearly price is great compared to what was originally offered ($150/year for those of us in the trial), but I might find more value going with the monthly plan until August when (Cthulhu-willing) we can go to the gym again.
I still have 6 days to figure that out.
Kathryn, Rest Day
My abs. Jesus Christ, my abs.
Pro-tip: if you’re feeling cheeky after a few good runs at “Medium” intensity, don’t start up “Girl Power” because Lady Gaga will kick your butt.
Also: like Will, when I miss a target that I believe I should have hit, it tends to be on the left hand side. But I’d chalked that up to right-hand-dominance and not Quest tracking issues. Hmmmm.
Noah, Session Twenty One
Nothing too remarkable, I did “Pop Till You Drop” because that’s what I was in the mood for. Didn’t work up a mad sweat, but a deep one. You know?
DAY TWENTY THREE — MAY 17, 2020
Will, Session Thirteen
Today was a good day. I slapped on Supernatural and completely skipped today’s workout, “Slow Burn.” Low Intensity? No, thank you. Today is “Monster.”
Overall, this one was pretty good for a 30-minute stint. There were two songs that at Pro level need QA — “LA Devotee” by Panic! At the Disco, and one other song I cannot remember. Some of those targets just aren’t hittable with a sense of flow. Jerking motion and wrist flicks are required to get them all, and I thought that was the antithesis of Supernatural?
I wish I could remember the other song, but honestly I can’t. And that’s unfortunate, especially if I liked a tune. If I wanted to find a track on Spotify, I have to hop back into the headset to do so? Nah, not worth the effort.
Get No Proscenium’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
SubscribeSubscribe
But overall, it was good. In 30 minutes, I only lost tracking three times. And it wasn’t horrible. I’ve given up getting perfect on a workout because at this point it’s just dumb luck.
Noah, Rest Day
DAY TWENTY FOUR — MAY 18, 2020
Dialogue, 11:15am
Kathryn:
Supernatural State of the UnionA letter to our membersmedium.com
Will: I feel somewhat attacked
also now we KNOW the mappers are using Rift S to map, that’s not fair at all
Kathryn: Three FAQ questions devoted to why Will Cherry can’t score 100%
Will: I just want to yell out, if it wasn’t designed as a game, why is there a leaderboard and a discrete measurement of success?
Kathryn: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kathryn, Session Thirteen
“Remember, you’re not looking for perfection,” says the disembodied voice of Leanne Pedante through my headset’s speakers.
(I chuckle, because I know exactly who among us is indeed looking for a 100% perfect score; perfection-seeker, thy name is Will Cherry.)
Today’s “Medium” level intensity workout is “Follow Through.” After reading a long Medium essay from Chris Milk, founder of WITHIN, about Supernatural, I keep in mind Milk’s advice to follow through my swings in order to get a higher power score and, theoretically, a better workout. I’ve also discovered that I tilt the controllers slightly in a way that what should be a hit, isn’t registering as a hit, during Supernatural (though I suspect it counts as a collision in Beat Saber).
Taking all of these things in mind seems to work alright for the vast majority of the workout until I reach a series of rapid cross-body movements in Bazzi’s “Paradise” that alternate between hitting both targets at once on one side and then individually in a syncopated fashion and then back to both at once on the other side. Black/white both on the left at the same time, black, then white, then white/black both at the same time on the right, then white, then black. Boom, boom, boom, boom, yikes. The pattern is right at the edge of my ability and I can feel myself missing targets once in a while because I’m swinging my arms all the way out and back just the tiniest bit too slowly. I do alright, but I wonder how Noah’s dealing with all this. And while it’s a good workout, I can’t help but feel frustrated and missing just one or two targets can cause a chain reaction of losing one’s place in a song. Achieving “98% hits” when there’s over 1,600 targets is still a lot of missed targets!
Another thing: I’d love to filter the menu by only “Medium” workouts but that’s not a feature they’ve built just yet. So I end up bookmarking every single “Medium” workout as a workaround.
Additionally, it’s odd that some of the workouts have icons (“L,” “M,” “H”) and the “auto-intensity” ones don’t (why not just mark them with an “A”?) and sometimes the icons are too hard to see dependent upon the photo in the tile’s background.
Will, Sessions Thirteen & Fourteen
Two sessions today. I read the Medium article from Chris/Supernatural this morning and it’s nice to see them striving to improve the service. That’s a good sign, an omen the team is listening.
It’s not too-little-too-late. Chris makes some good points about future improvements to the app and addressing athlete concerns. But it feels… distant. It feels as if we’re told the app is perfect, it is you that is not thinking about this the right way. We didn’t make a game.
Sure, okay. But it’s not exactly the best to make an app with Who’s Line Is It Anyway? rules where the points don’t matter yet you tally them up anyway.
Gripes aside, Supernatural is the app I always wanted over Beat Saber. It has more UI polish, a prettier feel, and genuinely fluid choreography (on average). But it needs to come a ways before it’s a service demanding a fee of $120 per year or higher.
Also if you’re going to post a GIF of your targetmapper running the mapping tool on a Rift CV1, you know that influences the map’s design, right? You know Rift and Quest have very different tracking blindspots, right? You know this.
Noah, Session Twenty Two
Decided to give “Follow Through” a whirl, and the video intro tipped me off that this may have been constructed during the Before Times.
The mapping seems to bear that out, as this “Medium” ranked workout features lots of swift target combos that feel like they were calibrated for the more game-like version of Supernatural that we started with. For the first time in a week and a half I give up halfway through a track and just stand there thinking “this is bullshit,” then get back to it when the section seems physically possible again.
It will be interesting to come back to this one in, say, a month — when I’m feeling even more in my skin — and see if I feel the same way about it. But at this moment, well, let’s just say I’m glad that there’s a bunch of other workouts here in this app, and I’m glad to learn that they’re continuing to tweak things going forward.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium web site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.
Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.