SOLOS smart glasses designed for cyclists and runners announced a new integration for the athlete training platform TrainingPeaks on Wednesday. The feature means that users will be able to get both audio and visual prompts from TrainingPeaks Structured Workouts through the smart glasses.
The glasses have a heads-up display that show data to an athlete while training, and small speakers near the ears to pass along audio information. The Structured Workouts system allows users to create plans focused on objectives like distance, duration, and intensity. (Intensity can be measured using metrics like power or heart rate.)
Back in 2016, SOLOS worked with Team USA and IBM ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. The U.S. went on to win silver in Women’s Team Pursuit there, and last April USA Cycling renewed its partnership with SOLOS ahead of Tokyo 2020.
“Bringing augmented reality technology to Team USA athletes set the gold standard for athlete feedback and the ability to make adjustments on the fly,” said Jim Miller, Vice President of Business Development and High Performance at TrainingPeaks, in the recent announcement about the TrainingPeaks integration.
The heads-up display on the smart glasses can show customizable color-coded ranges for specific targets such as power and heart rate, allowing a user to quickly understand if they are above or below the intensity they need to aim for. The SOLOS-TrainingPeaks integration app is free to existing customers of both products.
“As an avid TrainingPeaks athlete and coach for more than 10 years, I have been testing this integration for the past several months, and consider it to be one of the best system applications of SOLOS to date,” said Scott Fliegelman, Senior Director of Sales and Marketing at SOLOS, in the announcement. “Bringing together TrainingPeaks’ globally recognized expertise on sports performance with SOLOS’ augmented reality technologies marks a critical milestone for our product and tech roadmaps.”
SportTechie Takeaway
While SOLOS has expanded to running, cycling is perhaps the sport best suited to smart glasses. Most cyclists already wear glasses to protect against sun, wind, and dust, and many use a bike computer to track workouts and provide with metrics during a ride. However, those computers are usually located on the handlebars, requiring a rider to look away to gauge their progress and intensity with numbers. The new integration with TrainingPeaks could boost SOLOS’s popularity among its consumer target audience, elite amateur athletes.