♪ [music] ♪
- [Simon] This is Long Beach, California, and the reason I'm here isn't to look for
Snoop Dogg or take in the aquarium. No, it is far cooler, even,
than that, because somewhere on one of the floors above me is cycling's very own
virtual reality playground. This is the home of Zwift, and we're getting a total
exclusive, because they very kindly invited us over to take a look behind the
scenes. And, hopefully, when I get down from my wall, I might even be able to do a
bit of indoor cycling, as well.
♪ [music] ♪
- Hey.
- [Scott] Hey, Simon. Welcome to Zwift HQ.
- Thanks, man. Cheers.
- How was the ride?
- Yeah, it's good.
- Awesome, awesome. Well, rack your bike, and we'll get you into the showers.
- Thanks. So, this is where it all happens, although, if I'm being completely
honest, I'm not entirely sure what "it" actually is, because Zwift shares as much
of its DNA with the computer games industry as it does with the bike
industry. So I am kind of in new territory here, but there are a lot of similarities,
as well. We still have our team of designers, and then we've still got our
team of engineers that helped put the design into practice. And then,
of course, we finish it all up with the product-testing team, as well.
But we are going to start at the beginning with this man in here,
who is effectively the games master. Jon, how you doing?
- [Jon] Hey.
- Nice to meet you.
- Yeah, nice to meet you, too.
- So Jon, it's fair to say, is actually the man who invented Zwift,
and it existed for quite a long time before people like me were actually able
to use it. You had it for your own personal use, is that right?
- I did. I started it, sort of writing some software in 2010, in the winter.
As soon as daylight savings hit, it was a double whammy. I had a newborn baby,
daylight savings hit, I wanted to continue riding. Got a trainer,
was bored to tears on the first ride, and being from the video game industry for 15
years at that time, I figured there was probably a better way,
and started writing something. Within a week, I was off and running and riding
around in a world.
- So, what does Zwift version one actually look like, then?
- So, the first version, I was actually, it was solo. As a one-man programming
team, I couldn't really do a full online world, so this was one rider in a world
full of trees and butterflies and wilderness.
- And so how does it get, then, from being something that you have developed for
yourself personally to actually becoming a business? Where did Zwift then come from?
- So, I had been kind of planning to do a Kickstarter over the years
and had been trying to drum up a little bit of interest. I was posting screenshots
on the internet, specifically Slowtwitch, which is a triathlon web forum,
and that is when Eric Min, CEO of Zwift, saw a post. He was trying to do something
similar. He was trying to get together a team. He saw what I had been posting and
it was right up his alley, so he flew over to Los Angeles from London.
I gave him a demo, and two months later, Zwift existed.
- No way. And at what point, then, did it go from being like a single-player
platform to this, kind of, this social thing that it is? You know,
we've experienced it firsthand at GCN, you know, when I raced Jens Voight
back in the early days, so when did that happen?
- Well, that was the plan from day one of Zwift being formed. It was going to be a
social, interactive thing. So that just took a little bit of, you know,
hiring and having the funds to actually hire some people to build servers and
infrastructure, and it takes, you know, several more programmers than just me.
- Yeah, so, we kind of experienced that social thing earlier on with where we
raced Jens Voight, and, you know, he was in America and we were in the U.K.,
but we still had this cool head-to-head race, you know? It was great.
- For you, it was great. For him, I still hear he's really annoyed about the outcome
of that. Then I think there's going to have to be a rematch for this.
- A rematch? Well, we're pretty game on GCN, you know, me and Dan,
we could take Jens again.
- So, one of the first things you notice when you are riding in Zwift is probably
the depth and the detail of the 3D environment that you're surrounded by,
and so these are the guys that actually make that happen. So this is the graphics
team, and Tony here is one of the 3D artists. Hey, Tony.
- [Tony] Hi.
- Now you are working flat out at the minute, right?
- Mm-hmm.
- Because you've got something pretty important that's about to launch.
Can you give us a sneak peek?
- Yeah, sure.
- Is that a volcano, Tony?
- Yeah, it's a...
- You guys have just built yourself a volcano. That is cool. I suppose one of
the things that you can do in a virtual world for cycling is create stuff that,
clearly, you could never ride anywhere near, so that is actually really cool.
How long does it take you to do this? Because I suppose one of the things that
Zwift has done in the past was create, like, the Richmond world course and then
the RideLondon course, but that must be incredibly time-consuming,
to effectively draw a city.
- Yeah, yeah. It definitely is. Since this is a smaller expansion,
I think we've been working on this a little over a month.
- Wow.
- But Richmond and London took months, took a lot longer.
- Right, so next on our list are the programmers. Now, these guys are also
working flat out at the minute, because they're currently in the final stages of
releasing iOS-compatible Zwift. So that is Zwift on your iPhone and your iPad. But
then of course, you've got to remember that this is the team that's also
responsible for delivering some of the unique features already on Zwift, like the
cycling dynamics. And I gather this man here, Dan, was the one that was largely
responsible for delivering exactly that. Dan, hi.
- [Dan] How you doing?
- All right, nice to meet you. So, I gather you are the one that was in
charge of cycling dynamics, Peloton dynamics, if you like.
- Right.
- So, I don't know a great deal about computer programming, so perhaps you can
kind of distil down exactly how you did that, and made Zwift feel kind of
realistic, effectively, to cyclists.
- You know, you have to kind of look at it from two perspectives.
From both, you know, trying to replicate sort of the peloton, the pack dynamics of
a real life Peloton. Of course, we don't have control over the speed of the riders.
They're in control of the speed, but we're in control of the steering and,
you know, whether they're going to be passing or drafting. And you work all of
that into a system where, you know, it's kind of almost like working with the rider
in terms of, you know, he's sort of controlling his speed, and then you have
to interpret, like, if he's slowing down behind somebody, then does he want to tuck
in and draft that person? So we bring them in and draft them, and we do some,
you know, we try and anticipate what the rider's actually trying to do.
- Yeah, and you mentioned drafting there, so you're also responsible for factoring
in how much easier it is to sit behind someone on Zwift, is that right?
- Right. You know, I was building control of kind of the pack dynamics
and having guys get into position for drafting when I'm setting up draft lines,
but also, just the raw calculations of drafting and doing a simulation of,
you know, how the drafting works, and getting into a draft, and, you know.
There's not a lot of white papers on that kind of thing, but, you know, we could...
- You know, if you do enough digging, you can find some decent information.
- Finally, one thing I really want to talk to you about. I gather that you were
responsible for delivering one of my favorite all-time computer games,
which is "Road Rash," the motorbike racing game. There's a key feature on there,
where when you're riding, you can basically beat up your opponents.
Punch them, kick them, maybe hit them with a chain. You ever tempted to kind of maybe
build something like that into Zwift, just the ability to headbutt or, you know?
- There's always this little, you know, quiet talk amongst, you know, programmers
and artists and, you know, maybe throw in an animation here and there of a kick
and maybe have some secret code for being able to unlock it and being able to do it.
And, of course, you know, only the developers would know about it,
so we'd go out there kicking people around.
- So if anyone ever rides past you on Zwift and gives you a kick,
you know it's probably one of you guys, and you've got some super Jedi cheat
function. Right, well there you go. Good stuff. Well, I'll let you get back to it,
Dan. Thanks very much talking to us.
♪ [music] ♪
- So, once our designers have designed and our programmers have programmed,
we then move on to this team here. These guys are quality assurance,
so they're like our product testers, if you like. Although nothing is physically
being destroyed here, there is no comm being broken, if you listen carefully,
you may well hear the sound of computers actually screaming. Because
in here, there's just about every device going, because they need
to make sure that Zwift works perfectly on all of them, but then,
of course, it's not just about your device. There's also the hardware
element, as well. Now, if you come into their test lab here, Zwift don't actually
make trainers, but what they had to do was make sure that it worked with almost all
home trainers available on the market. And they know that it works with them all
because in here, they actually have all of them. And I mean literally,
all of them. It's particularly important for smart trainers to be able to interact
correctly with Zwift to make sure you get the best possible experience translating
the virtual into the real. But then, of course, you don't need a smart trainer.
You can use a much simpler trainer, and that's still going to work,
and that's predominantly down to the research that Zwift had done into
estimating the power curves of trainers. So, effectively, being able to work out
how much power you're putting out, simply through the velocity of your back wheel.
♪ [music] ♪
Now, you might be wondering why there is a giant pile of kids' toys in the middle of
Zwift HQ, and it's a pretty good question, really. And the reason is,
is that actually, Zwift ran a competition the other month, whereby if you completed
a certain amount of miles on a big wheeler in Zwift itself, then you're entered into
a draw where you could potentially come out to Long Beach, California,
and help present 100 of these kids' big wheelers to a local children's charity,
which sounds like a super cool initiative, if you ask me.
Right, it's time to do some riding now, because Scott here wants to talk me
through workout mode which is the more training-specific option that exists on
Zwift and has done for some time now, right? But it's not something that I'm
overly familiar with. So what are we looking at here?
- Well, before we dive too deeply into this, Simon, we have a special treat for
you today which is right over there.
- That looks like a treadmill, but it doesn't look big enough to ride on.
I don't really do running so much, but... Right, I suppose we'll come back to
workout mode in a future video, because I suppose I've got an appointment with
- Treadmill.
- Well, I've found a personal use for running mode, cyclocross training mode.
Now, it does feel like what we've seen here today is just the tip of the iceberg,
so there'll be more content to follow in the coming months just as soon as Jens
names his date. And if you want to be in the right place to see that rematch when
it comes, do make sure you subscribe to GCN. To do that, just click on the globe.
Or if you want to see the original Jens Voight race, then you can click just up
there, or to see the live Richmond race that we streamed on GCN,
click just down there. Right, got this [inaudible 00:11:50].