The Supernatural Diaries — Week One
NoPro’s team starts a 30-day challenge
In the before times, building the habit of regular exercise has been a struggle for many people, whether deciding to join a gym, visit their apartment building’s in-house gym, purchase a spin bike or treadmill for the spare bedroom, or become a devotee of the local OrangeTheory, CrossFit, SoulCycle, and the like. It is an activity marred by friction all around. And now, in our shared Corona-times, fitness devotees set alerts to be the fastest finger to grab some weights online or rediscover the joys of at-home resistance systems containing a myriad of straps and doodads. Which makes the entrance of Supernatural even more intriguing.
One part Beat Saber, one part National Geographic, and one part Peloton, this 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. So: we sent three NoPro staff members — a competitive Beat Saber player (Will Cherry) and two casual players (Noah Nelson and Kathryn Yu) — with Oculus Quest headsets on a fitness journey to find out if it really works. — Kathryn Yu, Executive Editor
The following will cover April 25th through May 1st, 2020
DAY ONE — APRIL 25, 2020
Noah Nelson, Publisher, Session One
I could like this. I’m sore from the beginner track. My play area is set up wrong, so I whacked my hand on the dining area chandelier. I still don’t know why we have one, and this is the largest contiguous space I have in the apartment.
The trainer, Leanne Pedante is quite motivational. I found myself laughing at points. This feels like play and not work.
Setup of the app is fine but the physical situation and the Apple Watch made it all a PITA. No heart rate info because I’m having to reset my Apple Watch. I worry that’s going to give me bandwidth problems but it doesn’t.
I’m a little uncertain about my form. The triangle guides give me a sense of the shape I’m trying to make but I’ve never been good at lunges and squats. I might be doing more harm than good? At least it’s just body weight resistance but I’ve got a fair amount of that, and an unnatural turnout that makes ballet dancers jealous and kinesiologists mortified.
By the end I’m drenched in sweat, but I want to reconfigure my space and get the heart rate monitoring going. Perhaps tonight.
Dialogue One
1:43 PM
Noah: Still sore from my 9am.
Will Cherry: OK OK, I’ll do it
2:17 PM
Will: And of course controller batteries are dead and there aren’t any in my GF’s house. Give me some more time, friend
Kathryn: Sure “dead battery” whatever.
Noah: That’s my one criticism of this so far: The hardware.
Will: The hardware?
Noah: This morning I: had to reformat my Apple Watch, slammed my hand into the chandelier (which I wish wasn’t there), moved so I was near the edge of my play area because of said chandelier.
Will: Had to reformat your watch?!
Noah: Yup. It had gotten unpaired and wouldn’t re-pair. So I couldn’t do the heart rate thing on my first workout. May do another one in a hour or two.
Will: Are you locked to only one account? Curious.
Noah: I’m confused on the lunges tho. Not sure I’m lunging in the right direction
Will: Wanted to get my GF with zero VR knowledge to try but I think it’s one account: one device. (Ed note: Will discovers later that you can set up multiple Supernatural accounts on one device.)
Kathryn: And you don’t want to screw up your progress?
Will: I guess
Kathryn: Yeah they really need multi user profiles. If we can log in via FB you should be able to link multiple FB accts.
Noah: They are pushing the “its a personal device” way too hard.
Will: OK, OK, I’ll hold off all of my critique until later, I usually come down too hard on these things. The environments are beautiful.
Noah: (I’m getting the free face mask thing! That’s cool.)
4:21 PM
Will: okay, @Kathryn I’m in, it’s your turn.
Kathryn Yu, Executive Editor: Session One and 1.5
The first thing I noticed was that while the Oculus Quest itself removes a lot of the friction of getting into VR, the friction around learning a new rhythm game’s user interface as well as signing up for a free 30 day trial felt, well, mildly annoying at best. Must I really take off my headset, grab my smartphone, download an app, and then enter in my credit card information to start my free trial? And then download the app to my smart watch? How does this app work? Can any random person “follow” me on the service? Am I really using my full name on here? To be honest, when prompted to sign up for the trial, I decided to charge up my Quest instead and do these tasks on my iPhone while also catching up on Brooklyn 99 on the couch. I’ll try a real workout later, I promised myself. Captain Holt needs me now!
Later that evening, I decided to hop back in and grabbed whatever the workout of the day was. Surely I can go straight from the tutorial to this daily workout… and I’m pretty decent at Beat Saber, so it can’t be that bad, I thought. Boy, was I wrong.
Flailing around like a beached whale, I felt clumsy and unsure of myself. Am I doing this right? The interface of the experience implies approximately where to place your feet and what direction to face, but spinning around or shuffling back and forth still felt unnatural to me on my second go-round. I’d been told that spheres with trailing arrows would tell me when to turn, but this turned out to be only applicable to larger turns. I’d expected to see very obvious arrows even for the smaller ones, leading to some disastrous movements as I tried to catch up. It’s a miracle I didn’t accidentally kick something. Huffing and puffing, I hit the menu button and quit out of my session with the dreaded “partial workout” event now shown in the activity stream to all my friends on the service. I vowed to return later and choose a beginner level instead.
Will Cherry, NoPro Senior XR Correspondent, Session One:
I start out my journey into Supernatural with a mix of skepticism and optimism — can a VR experience slice through Beat Saber’s design for fitness fanatics to fawn over? Can WITHIN deliver a dynamic workout for players every day, month, and year for a collective $240? This month, we at No Proscenium aim to find out.
I’m no stranger to rhythm slashers (yep, that’s the genre). With dozens of Beat Saber hours logged on my PC and Quest, and I’d like to believe I’m “professional” enough to take on any beatmap thrown my way (that isn’t an anime intro song). The Beat Saber Mapper community is one I watch often as regular players become creators of popular “beatmaps” to songs we love and add them to the game using mods (unlicensed game code add-ons). The beatmapping community is supportive and diverse enough to provide almost any song you can imagine, provided you know how to modify (and potentially damage) your VR software.
That’s where Supernatural has a major advantage. By pairing with Universal Music Group, WITHIN can craft their own beatmaps to most popular songs you know. That has a lot of power compared to Beat Saber’s smaller map packs and default tracks. Not to mention, one of WITHIN’s primary “beatmappers” is Benny Da Beast, a popular Beat Saber mapper whose maps are considered peak quality by the community.
So Supernatural has a lot going for it: professional trainers, beautiful backgrounds, top-tier maps, and songs that slap. But can it carve its place in a space dominated by rhythm games like Pistol Whip and Beat Saber and VR fitness tracker systems like YUR?
For one, Supernatural’s system of linking a phone app to your Oculus Quest is a bit cumbersome, but does seem easy enough. The pairing is fast and responsive, which is great considering any point of friction with VR can be a show-stopper. However, I’m a bit disappointed that there are a slew of heart rate tracker issues and my Samsung Active Watch 2 is a no-go on compatibility.
I hop in my Quest, and once my account is created, I go through the tutorial and calibration. Calibration itself is a great feature and I admire that it isn’t like Beat Saber in that the app gathers your ability and adjusts its difficulty based on what you can do. But, we can’t see this outright. And a lack of transparency can lead to some confusion or doubt, which leads to Supernatural’s biggest flaw. (Don’t worry, I’ll get to it.)
With calibration out of the way, I head right to “Pros Only” as my first workout. If I can dominate most Expert+ Beat Saber songs, surely this won’t be bad, right?
And then I saw it. And I realized. This wasn’t completing one song at a time, it was a gauntlet of songs. There’s a list of six songs in a row for a 20-minute non-stop game. This is an endurance run. Meanwhile, very few Beat Saber players are equipped for intensity lasting longer than six minutes.
Fortunately, Supernatural doesn’t rely on tricky drumming or a slew of notes, and instead focuses more on your squats. Sure enough, the difficulty of the game is much easier than I thought, but the endless stand-and-squat movements get to my legs. It’s harrowing, but I finished and have a relatively high accuracy score (95%). But this accuracy was something that bothered me not as a player, but as a designer.
Beat Saber (and some of its mods) is designed in a way where feedback is core to gameplay. How a note feels when you cut it, the sound it creates, the controller rumble on a hit, and a score identifier help determine your progress in-the-moment, realtime. This helps us improve and feel good about success, and when you’re incorrect, you look forward to improvement even in the midst of a song.
Supernatural took some good lessons from Beat Saber but lacks many of these design nuances. Hitting a note doesn’t create a crunch as satisfying, and improperly hitting a note sounds like you tapped a balloon out of your way. The feedback is more subtle. It’s softer. It’s meant to keep players’ spirits up about a mistake and to power through, but for many game-playing folks (and the vast majority of Quest owners, I presume), it feels like we cannot gauge our mistakes. We don’t know how to improve. We have no metrics.
Now, at the end of every workout you’re met with metrics, sure. And these are insightful about your accuracy, how hard you hit, etc. But showing these graphs after-the-fact doesn’t correlate well to our gameplay. We don’t know where in a song we messed up and we can’t remember it. Not to mention, we don’t see many numbers at all. Supernatural works using a mystery algorithm under the hood, where curious players may wonder how exactly their score is counted per-hit and per-squat. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but compared to Beat Saber, the other game makes these numbers very clear. Competitive players can see a path for improvement and that’s a large driving factor for returning players.
Supernatural definitely wants to encourage that same competitive behavior. As I finish my workout, it “publishes” it like an Instagram post, where other users following me can like and comment. I get some hearty congrats for my first run, which feels good! But I get lost when I look at the weekly leaderboards, which are only comprised of… only me. Soon I realize I have to follow others to see their scores (such as Kathryn and Noah) and then they populate just fine. But the odd thing is… leaderboards are temporary, and they are cumulative, prioritizing volume of play sessions over accuracy or power.
One of the things I’m selfishly proud of… is when Beat Saber first appeared on the market I clutched a place on the global leaderboard for each song at Expert level. At certain points, I had the Oculus World Record for most of them (other players have naturally taken those titles away). However, Beat Saber’s leaderboard shows progress over time by displaying your best score over the length of the game’s history.
Supernatural doesn’t have that. It’s a weekly system where the scores reset, which means you never really see how you stack up over time. Normally, that would be okay. I understand, having the rest of the globe against you can feel crushing and fitness is a personal journey! But if you put in leaderboards, only including the folks you follow is pretty limiting. But that’s not the biggest problem with it.
The biggest problem with the leaderboards is that they are cumulative. Each time you finish a workout you get Supernatural Points (an algorithm-based combination of accuracy, power, and the playlist’s difficulty), and these add to your weekly score. That’s an odd rule in a system which rewards those that train longer than those who improve their skill. Thus it becomes a competition of who’s in-headset the longest throughout a week.
Asking “Who’s more dedicated to Supernatural?” is a big fitness no-no. I’m a gym rat (except in quarantine), and I’ve learned dozens of times over it’s not how much you lift or bike, but your performance in proper form. Supernatural’s system seems to encourage athletes to keep working out and focusing on the number of sessions more than the workout itself. While trainers speak to you mid-playlist with proper form reminders (that feature is one I like), these considerations usually fall to the wayside when competitive play is on the mind. And encouraging players to overdo it can lead to potential injury. At least Beat Saber makes it clear before you get going that you should take breaks.
But I’m in this for the trial, and I want to see what the difference can be. Perhaps I’m assuming too much, and Supernatural is brilliant. We’ve got 29 more days to go.
Noah, Session Two (Same Day)
Still sore from the morning, I want to try out another level, in my reworked space, and get some more points on the board even though I’m not going to be competitive.
The leaderboard is actually a problem that way. I thought we were supposed to be competing with our past selves — that’s what self improvement is about — but instead we’ve got a high score board. I’m already connected with someone who uses Supernatural a lot, so I’ll never see the top of the board.
That’s a discouragement, actually. Unlike the little notifications I get on my Watch — the reformat is complete — that let me know my buddy Tonx has completed a workout. Like the nudge I get from Duolingo to jump into a Spanish lesson. Both are welcome interruptions. Seeing someone have 100 times the number of points you do when you log in is not.
I choose today’s workout. Might as well stay current, which says it has dynamic difficulty. By the end I’m not that sure of that. Everything raced at me. I’m still not sure if I’m doing the lunges right. But the music and the feeling is keeping me going. I will probably be very, very sore in the morning. (Spoiler: I am.) But I got in two a day. At least today. That’s pride I’m feeling.
DAY TWO — APRIL 26, 2020
Noah, Session Three
Today I remember why I don’t do group workout classes.
But let’s start with the positive: Leanne is great. Like, legit great. In the pre-warm up she offers up both the mentality AND gives some notes on what the movements should be doing. How the swings should be connecting across the body and not just be loose flailing.
I feel like the game portion is failing her.
The sessions say they feature dynamic difficulty, but I have a hard time believing that as scores of targets crisscrossed with seemingly no rhythmic pattern zoom at me. My arms swing about but there’s no feeling of connection to my hips, abdomen, shoulders. I’m just trying to keep up and it’s relentless and when I can’t I just stop trying.
The next track seems to shift down, but did it do that because of me or because that’s what it always does? I don’t trust it. And above all else I’m not in the moment. I’m not in the flow of the song. Leanne says encouraging things but her dialogue is detached from my actual effort.
Everything feels like a lie.
Afterwards I find myself wanting more tutorials, and maybe some katas: sessions that focus on a type of moment so that muscle memory starts to get into the mix. So that I can focus on form and then tackle other challenges. But there’s only the workouts that are on offer. A design that feels exclusionary for those who could benefit the most: people like me.
I don’t like to drop the “X should have been a launch feature” argument, but these should have been a launch feature. There’s so much polish here but “sink or swim” is the number one barrier on exercise for those who don’t exercise. I can’t even break down a single track or adjust the pace so I can learn the choreography like I can in Beat Saber. These are not nice to have features, these are necessities.
And while I turned the tracking on my watch on, I didn’t turn it on in the phone app, so none of that made it through. That’s a lot of intermediate steps. Too many. Might be a necessity but sheesh.
For the first time, I feel like this experiment might be a bust for me. Which is a shame, because my heart rate is getting up and I’m winded and sore and I’m liking all that. But it’s too goddamn frustrating to miss all those targets. It’s throwing me out of flow and putting me in a worse mood than when I pulled the helmet on.
Kathryn, Session Two
As a lover of Beat Saber, I notice on my second try of Supernatural that the black and white semi-transparent baseball bats used here feel like an odd metaphor (“Peanut Butter Jelly Time,” anyone?). My first time in the experience, I immediately crossed my two bats (which is something I do all the time with my two lightswords in Beat Saber) and looked for that nice punch of haptic feedback we know and love from Beat Saber. Alas, the bats simply passed through one another. Overall, the haptic feedback in Supernatural feels a tad too subtle as do the black and white marbles you’re supposed to slice. One reason why the Beat Saber cyberpunk aesthetic works so well is that there’s no other visual elements to compete for your attention; in Supernatural I found myself constantly distracted by the gorgeous background visuals as well as squinting to see the moving targets upon the light-colored 360 environment around me.
Another element that I searched for and didn’t see some indication of progress, be it time remaining on the current song, number of spheres left still to slice for this song, or even the number of songs remaining on the playlist for that particular workout. Part of the reward mechanism for any interactive experience is feedback to the participant as to how well they’re doing; Supernatural only shows a series of percentages at the very end of the workout as opposed to real time meters around the user’s progress, combos, or health. Perhaps the intent is not to make users feel bad if they aren’t doing well, but there’s also value in feeling a progressive sense of accomplishment during the workout itself. The only thing I can do is look down at my Apple Watch via a tiny gap in the VR headset and see my current heart rate (though I can’t get it to consistently save to the app). That’s a far cry from finally earning an “S” on a difficult Beat Saber level or seeing the phrase “Full Combo” at the end of the song with the accompanying fireworks. Setting and achieving personal goals is a big part as to why other workout programs are successful. I’m not sure how that works here.
It probably sounds like I don’t like Supernatural and that’s not exactly true — the workouts it has provided me thus far are challenging and satisfying. It’s cool to work out in VR to Dua Lipa or Lizzo. I’m even considering keeping the membership after the free trial period ends if they can add some more of the features I’ve mentioned above or the ability to mute the coach (I see the intent, but I have difficulty focusing when there’s an invisible person talking in my ears). After going back and selecting a more appropriate workout the second day, I enjoyed the challenge of working at the extremes of my ability by squatting, spinning, and slicing for 20-odd minutes at a time. With practice, I can see myself eventually reaching a flow state in Supernatural. However, I still don’t feel completely comfortable in my footwork when turning in circles (and the app doesn’t provide a lot of guidance as to how that should work). I imagine that will pass over time as I become more familiar with how Supernatural expects players to move.
I also wonder how my feelings towards the experience will change over time. Typically, I start out a new Beat Saber song on “Easy” or “Normal” and work my way up the difficulty ladder (though I’m nowhere near as good as our AR/VR correspondent Will Cherry), but one of Supernatural’s selling points is that the app claims to dynamically adjust the difficulty level based upon how well you’re doing. As someone who enjoys data and stepping the difficulty level up or down based upon how I’m feeling, the algorithm being used makes the level of physical challenge feel opaque and out of my own control. And given how little control we have over most aspects of our lives these days, that’s rather disappointing.
Will, Session Two
- Felt a lot better this time, but still having issues with my left bat crossing to my right side. I hit those notes, but it just doesn’t register. This is an ongoing issue.
- I was in ‘flow’ during this one, until I hit my girlfriend’s wall. The anxiety of hitting anything ruined the rest of the workout for me. I never had this in Beat Saber, and I think it’s due to the fact that Supernatural requires a MUCH larger open-area footprint. They don’t make that clear, but you need a 1.5m x 1.5m area to feel comfortable you’re not going to hit anything. Once you hit something, a) it hurts, and b) I want to be done right on the spot.
- There’s a stretch at the end of this session! It’s small, kinda not that effective, but helpful to carve out that time.
DAY THREE — April 27, 2020
Noah, 12:46pm
The beast is up! My ass still hurts. But less so. I didn’t jump in this morning — had a 9:30AM call — so I’m planning on doing my set tonight. Also to give myself more recovery time. Think I’m going to go *back* to “the beginning” unless there’s a new low impact one available today. Very curious how they are going to parse the content out. Esp. given the current situation.
Will, Session Three, 6:45pm
I’ve decided to do (minimum) one workout per day, the suggested one Supernatural provides. I really like that actually, that my workout feels different every day. With Beat Saber I was constantly searching for new songs to master, but with this I never have that problem. The maps, like the beats, are always fresh.
And yet that grinds a gear slightly. I can’t tell at this point when I’ll return to these songs again at this difficulty (Pro). And because it is my first time seeing them, I’m flying blind through the workout as notes fly at me in unfamiliar ways. I love the challenge, but it’s a double-edged sword. In Beat Saber, our goal as players is to beat the game by proxy: to master a level by hitting it again and again and learn the movement pattern until flawless. Supernatural doesn’t let us do that, exactly. We go with the flow, trying our best to keep up and learn on-the-fly. So far in all my leaderboard searching I’ve found few, if any, 100 percentages.
Of course, I can’t be that upset about the lack of ability to “practice” a song before working out to it — Beat Saber didn’t implement “Practice Mode” until months after initial release. But it would be nice in the future to learn how a song’s chorus map is going to work, like a “preview” of our workout so we aren’t blindsided. I brought my girlfriend along my journey with me, and while she really enjoys the experience, sometimes she’s too overwhelmed when she’s motioned to turn only to find a target in her face.
Anyway, I go through the motions of the level and finish it off. 17 minutes, 99%. Feels good, less arduous than I remember. This is a workout compared to Beat Saber and I appreciate it greatly. But I’m still missing notes from time to time, and noticing that the ‘flow’ of particular songs is downright difficult. I can tell these maps are tested, but I cannot tell if WITHIN’s QA team is able to 100% them. Maybe that perfection-reach is intentional. My new goal this month is to get 100% in both Power and Accuracy. If I can’t do that, I’ll want to see someone who can.
Here’s a note… Since this entry was originally written I’m noticing changes! When I finished the workout, my power/accuracy numbers came with a description of how they add together to form my overall Supernatural Score performance. Just when I thought it was a mystery, the answer was revealed. I feel either validated, or dumb for not noticing before.
Noah, Session Four, 7pm-ish
Before we get going: updates. Updates to the Apple Watch. Updates to the Oculus App. Deep down I know that’s good news but UGH this is why I don’t play my game console as much as I used to. Technology, especially social media, has destroyed any patience I once had.
Call it the irrationality of rationalization if you must but it’s real and it’s awful.
The gap between “okay let’s do this” and actually getting into the app is long enough that I change my game plan. I WAS going to roll back to “Beginners Only” and work on my core competencies but screw it- “Sunshine” is only 15 minutes long and there are neat songs in it.
I figure I’ll test just how dynamic the difficulty is.
Warm up goes great. I’m connecting. I feel my posture is good. Breathing is alright. Let’s get to that first song.
And it all quickly gets out of hand. Just straight slamming on that hand eye coordination when I want to focus on my power and posture. Quit. Quit.
Okay. Back to the original plan.
“Beginners Only,” round two.
This time I’m more certain my posture is wrong wrong wrong in the lunges. I catch myself instinctively ducking a lot. That’s no good. I want it to be in my hips. My head knows what to do but my body, well let’s just call it kinesthetic dysmorphia: the spirit is willing but the flesh is a klutz. I laugh at it, but only because it’s the shadow that stalks me and I don’t know what else to do but laugh. I’m more out of shape now than at any point in the past 20 years. And this disconnect has always been down near the root of that.
Anyway. The pace — this one is stuck on easy, no dynamic wibble wobble — is steady enough that I can get a bit more into my power and accuracy for both the arms and the squats and lunges. It’s diagnostic at this point, and I back off a bit to try and give myself the balance in the triangles. Look: it is very, very easy to lose your center of gravity when you are 50 lbs overweight and a good portion of that is a spare tire.
But the music and the latter keeps me going — though I do find it weird that we’ve got some skinny triangles to shape into during a Lizzo song. Are we being judged for being big? The thought comes and goes but the rhythm here is good. All this rhythm is good. Maybe it’s that it is slightly familiar but this is feeling polished is a real way on a second run.
I get through and know what? I’m gonna tackle Sunshine. Only I’m going to not push it because I can see that my heart rate — I turned everything on this time — is keeping just under the red zone. Gonna pull back and not push it on the triangles. Only tackle the ones I don’t feel rushed on.
Second set goes okay. Find myself wondering at points if it would make sense for there to be alternate coaching tracks for things like this. So that I can run the course over but not have it feel exactly the same.
By the end: I’m sweaty and warm but I don’t ache. And I didn’t put undue pressure on my back.
While I was thinking of taking a rest day tomorrow, if I don’t wake up in agony I’m going to hit the platform again. Keep the streak going. Just like my Duolingo.
Dialogue Three, 7:34pm
Noah: Okay @Kathryn, I want to tag something with you: you dig the formless void of Beat Saber more?
Will: There’s a major design reason for liking it. I fancy it more.
Noah: See, I’m loving these nature settings. I will likely never get to see these places IRL — which if I dwell on it will make me sad — but one thing I love about Within is how goddamn good they are with the 360 nature photo/videography.
I actually do feel inspired and less tired being in that space. The Grid in Beat Saber tires me out aesthetically after a while even if I know it’s using less power/not messing my eyes up as much.
Kathryn: The black/white spheres don’t have enough contrast against the nature backgrounds.
I’ve also found myself distracted staring at the gorgeous surroundings and literally missing the first few slices!
Whereas the formless void of Beat Saber provides the most contrast for the red/blue blocks and the arrows the slices should be going in and for the animation when the left/right blocks reverse themselves, signaling that a switch is coming up. I consistently hit the wrong color sphere in Supernatural since it takes additional cognitive effort to recognize that what I see next is a white sphere, and it’s facing left, and it’s on my left hand side, and I should move my arm across my body quickly ahead of time.
My update is in.
Will: Thanks for the update!
I echo the same as Kathryn with an ounce of Noah. The environments are beautiful and energizing. But contrast is a big problem. I noticed I was having to react quickly since I couldn’t see notes coming towards me in setting darks or highlights. The best fix I can think of is WITHIN offering athletes the ability to change colors of their bats/targets.
Beat Saber made this change too, to accommodate certain colorblind players and those that want to make it comfortable for themselves.
Kathryn, Session 3, 8:30pm:
That’s it. That’s the update.
Just kidding. I add this screenshot to show how easy it is to game the Supernatural leaderboard. Typically I would expect myself to be far below Will, our resident expert, but it turns out if you begin to work out and quit out of it you still get some amount of points.
So my partial workout and my completed workout put me at the top of the scoreboard above both Noah and Will. (Turns out there’s no easy way to restart a workout or delete a partial workout if you were interrupted, you just weren’t feeling it, you dropped the controller, etc.)
Noah, 9:30pm
Watch your back.
Also: Hi, Alex.
DAY FOUR — APRIL 28, 2020
Will, Session Four, 7:00pm
I want to start this segment with my usual ranting, but the last paragraph applies to everyone. So feel free to save time and TL;DR this. I polished off the daily routine “Balance” in 12 minutes, but came away… fine. No major sweat. Heavy breathing, but not exhausted. So I hop back in afterwards for “Tough,” a 27-minute juggernaut.
I come away from the experience sweaty and panting, and that’s a good sign. As I began, I thought to myself, “this isn’t so bad, I get new songs and variation and there are some I like.” Except… it really isn’t that way. I enjoyed one song from yesterday’s workout and I can’t remember what it was. Unlike Beat Saber, I can’t go back and play that one song again, I have to go through the whole workout. Oh well, it’ll show up soon.
Another issue sprang up where I hit my girlfriend’s couch. It seems no matter how large of a play area I clear out, I keep hitting things before Supernatural tells me I’m off my mat. It’s incredibly frustrating for someone trying to perfect a run only for a controller to hit something, have me wince in pain, lose tracking for 2 seconds, and miss 3 notes. It makes me want to start over and I can’t — I’m too far in.
I still yell, “OH COME ON!” when controller tracking fails overhead. When my hits register too late. When my bats are too short to reach notes high up. These are issues also found in high-level Beat Saber and that’s valid. However, some of Supernatural’s official maps feel like they weren’t tested hard enough for a variety of fluid human movement and reach. (Try the song “Titanium” at Pro level and tell me you can hit cross-overhead notes in full squat four times in a row every chorus.)
Is Beat Saber perfect? Absolutely not. Do they test their levels to make sure they are 100%-achievable? Yes. Or at least the ones at initial release. Camellia, I have no idea.
But it’s not about perfecting a workout, Will!
You’re right, it’s about fitness. The movement. But at this level of play, perfection is the only goal I really have.
Sidenote: sometimes I want to see my progress during my workout. How many songs do I have left? Can I make my meeting in 20 minutes? (I did, but barely.) Seeing our workout progress on a pause would be nice.
TL;DR — I’m moving along, but still looking for a challenge. I have to REALLY clear out space and focus, but it’s starting to be enjoyable. I just want to be familiar with song patterns so I enjoy the experience more than I’m trying to figure out where my arms go. However, my girlfriend really enjoys the app. So much so she’s planning her Supernatural workout after yoga and pilates as a final burn every day as she completes the challenge with me. That’s good news that she enjoys it: she’s normally someone that pays for Spin Classes every month. She’s WITHIN’s target market, and quarantine is helping facilitate her VR fitness adoption.
Also, I’m calling this the #SupernaturalChallenge. Join along if you like!
Noah, Rest Day
Since on top of having calls from the word jump and workmen crawling all over the building since 8AM (my landlords are… anyway) today was also my “hunt” day I didn’t squeeze a workout in. By the time I had free time, I was wiped from the supply run, which causes its own physical and psychological stress.
Which was compounded by the constant drone of power tools and workmen talking outside every conceivable window.
DAY FIVE — APRIL 29, 2020
Kathryn, Rest Day, 9:30am
I’m sore. Everywhere hurts. Triceps, glutes, obliques, hamstrings, abs. Despite doing a fair amount of stretching, Supernatural is more intense of a workout than I expected.
If pain is weakness leaving the body, then I am a fountain of weakness. Enough weakness to fill a bank vault and swim in it, Scrooge McDuck style. An Olympic-sized swimming pool of weakness.
I took a rest day yesterday after turning in my Unity final, and opting for a bubble bath instead. I’ll pick Supernatural up again this afternoon, hopefully.
Noah, Session Five, 9:00am
Workmen at the crack of 8am, ripping off the security bars with power saws and singing just outside of my bathroom while I pee.
It’s fucking hell here.
But I strap in anyway and pop in my earbuds, stashing the cord in my shirt so I don’t rip it out while swinging.
Today’s workout offering is a toned down version of a Pros Only with a different trainer, but I see that yesterday was a short run — 13 minutes — with Leanne called “Balance” so I log into that.
Once again she gives clarity around what we’re trying to accomplish with the moves: bringing the torso and hips into the equation on the strikes.
Once again the beat mapping seems to undermine all of this. Target pop-ups coming so quickly that you’d have to be Ray Park or Jackie Chan to get to them. Wrist flicks do way better than engaging even the upper arm. The expressed goal and the feedback mechanism in conflict.
There are moments when flow is possible. Moments when I feel my body connecting. Where I know I’m making the right shapes with my body. Then it’s wham wham pop pop. And often I know it’s not that I’m too slow or clumsy, the space between targets is too small. The balloons may be matching the beat, but they’re not spatially aware.
And the score feedback compounds that. If I want to climb up the leaderboard I’m better off focusing on speed than on form. Which is not what you want out of a workout.
So I ignore the beat mapping and I focus on my motions. Which means I’m fighting the game aspects to get what I need and what the coaches are telling me I should want.
Within needs to make a choice soon: is this a workout program or a video game? Because it can’t be both. And it’s marketed as the former.
While I do all this I can hear a guy tearing metal out of my kitchen window, after the set I pop my head out to see a guy on a ladder in my off-the-ground level window. Just great.
I drop back in to check out a little of today’s “Dark Forces.” New trainer: Jared Rodriguez. Great attitude. And some guidance on what I should be doing with the strikes and the lunges. I feel more confident after that orientation. Warm up is good and I focus on my form and I’m feeling solid. Maybe they are tweaking it?
First song and I feel a bit more in sync. Playing at the edge of my ability but for the most part able to stay focused on form and follow the coach’s advice. Then something shifts. I can sense that either the dynamic difficulty decided to crank things up or it’s just the beat map and suddenly we are back to wrist flicking.
Fuck this.
I got my time in today and put points on the board. Maybe I’ll come back around tonight, but there’s a stack of bureaucracies to navigate today and I’m likely in no mood to have this dissonance on top of that.
Kathryn, Session Four, 5pm
After a grueling day of 6 straight hours of graduate school over Zoom (yes, you heard me), I finally turn off my webcam and grab my Oculus Quest at the end of the day. I’m curious about what happens when you repeat a workout so that’s my goal for today: try a workout that I’ve tried previously so that I can a) remember what songs struck me as interesting; and b) see if there’s anything to be gained from previously experiencing the same playlist.
This time around, I’m also armed with feedback from Chris Milk on Twitter as well as Noah’s experience. It might be construed as “gaming” the system, but I’m now conscious that I need to keep my arms a little bit closer to my torso and that the bats in Supernatural don’t reach as long as the sabers in Beat Saber. This means moving my arms and swinging a hair faster than I might normally in a game of Beat Saber and not extending them so much each time (which means I use less power but I feel better about hitting more targets). A scenario that I might perceive as a solid hit in Beat Saber is just outside the collider in Supernatural and I’ll need to “relearn” this muscle memory to do better in Supernatural until they can patch this functionality. Given this info, I’m now assuming all of our shared frustrations with targets that we think we have hit is not due to the Quest’s tracking but rather our phantom “saber” limbs being shorter than we think they are.
This hunch seems to work out for me today. Both having done this workout once already and consciously thinking about using “shorter sabers” means that I get a pretty nice workout and find myself almost slipping into the flow zone a few times… that is, until my right controller slips out of my sweaty hand, and I miss a dozen targets while getting it situated back into my hand. Have you ever played a rhythm game while accidentally holding the controller backwards in your hand? Well, now I know what that’s like. Thank god for the wrist straps is all I can say.
Stretching is also a bit awkward in the game when the coach asks me to stand shoulders width apart and bend over, lowering my head to the floor. Forgetting I have a computer strapped to my face, I immediately start to tip over when I mimic her motions. Whoops. Instead I ignore what the VR lady is doing and instead do a pigeon stretch on my own, sitting up. And the 90 second stretch we do in VR is nowhere near long enough after such an intense workout.
If I had to map it out myself, I’d say that I am right on the edge between the anxiety zone and flow state when in Supernatural; I’ve got a toe in the water but I’m not fully submerged just yet. I still want more of a visual cue when a left/right swapped target is coming up and the soft “thud” and bounce of a “wrong color” balloon when I’ve mistaken left for right (or vice versa) is becoming more and more irritating as I become more proficient at Supernatural. Maybe it’s the completist in me but I feel a tiny bit dejected every time I miss a target (though given it was a repeat workout I did finally start to recognize some patterns in the beat mapping as I was playing).
All that said, there is a very satisfying “whoosh” sound and animation as I overtake Noah on the leaderboard for the week. And now that I’ve got the heart rate tracking working, there are a lot more interesting metrics to look at when the workout is complete. But I remain iffy on the lack of in-workout feedback mechanisms in Supernatural. It’s still requiring a lot of conscious effort to look ahead and anticipate what’s coming up, much more than I’d like.
And weirdly, the song I liked the most from my workout (“Sizzlin” by Aiza) also doesn’t appear to exist anywhere else on the Internet.
Will, Session Five, 9:30pm
Day 5 in the books. Today’s workout was a “Dark Forces,”, a “Pros Only”-light version, only covering about 20 minutes. I wasn’t feeling so great afterwards, but I’m 100% sure it was due to eating Extra Spicy Thai yellow curry beforehand. Please learn from my mistakes.
Overall I’m enjoying my carve out of the day to dedicate to this challenge, and as I improve I enjoy Supernatural a little more with each visit. I’m not entirely improving in my skill or accuracy, but in my understanding of the system as a whole. If anything, I’m becoming used to my workouts. I’m not sore at all anymore.***
Many of the others’ sentiments above I’ll echo here. Fortunately I’m familiar with today’s songs as they are some of the ones I started this journey with. So naturally, I was better at seeing them coming. At this point I’m very in-tune with the app and its mappings (or at least the styles of WITHIN’s on-staff mappers), yet I can’t breach 99% Accuracy nor 97% Power.
Accuracy I understand: I need to hit each target and squat to music in the right direction. But now that I know my bats are shorter than sabers, it’s intended that I’ll reach a bit farther for a hit. Supernatural doesn’t want us slacking and I applaud that. But some of these Pro maps are just plain difficult to hit all the notes, when notes are obscured by squatting triangles or coming in our peripheral vision. You’d have to memorize the song fully through workout-grinding, or be the mapmaker yourself.
Not only is hitting all the notes in Pro tricky, but so is doing it with full power. I appreciate WITHIN opening up stats for me to see how accurate I am, but power remains a mystery. Hitting a note “with power” implies strong Vector motion upon bat collision, but we’ll never really know the cutoff for “powerful.” That’s okay, we don’t need to know. But it’s really hard to track down where I’m losing power during a workout. After-the-fact on a graph isn’t precise enough, nor is it motivational enough.
And with that, we’re almost one whole week in. I’m enjoying the music, and getting used to the maps. But with a few songs repeated already, it makes me wonder: how many total songs are there?
*** I want to be clear, I’m an edge case for this challenge. Before we began I was spending nearly an hour grinding Beat Saber Expert+ maps every other day in quarantine. So, my words come with a handful of salt. ***
DAY SIX — APRIL 30, 2020
Noah, Session Six, 6:30 PM
Another night of bad sleep topped off with more power tools at 8am and a check in on the scale that had really bad news from the last time I got on it: up 5. Great.
I feel like total garbage today and feel like I look like garbage and thanks to the hostile construction conditions I decide to run another round of errands which stresses me out one way but not another.
In the early evening I’m feeling like even more garbage: energy is way low but some how I push through one “Breathe” (Jeni DelPozo) which makes me think that there are only two settings on these “dynamic difficulty” tracks: Easy and Hard.
It seems like the difficulty can change in certain phrases of a track, as I think I manage to step it down. Unfortunately I also find myself doing some really bad squat form at one point and later I detect some strain in my left knee. Is it my ACL? Maybe.
Out of curiosity I dip into Leanne’s “Joy” — which is a long set. At first I’m into the lower body stuff but as the targets come on it gets harder to focus on form and then I definitely feel the knee be a bit unhappy. No snaps or pulls. But I know to back off. After all, I’m a big guy, even bigger than I was before lockdown by a few pounds, and all of that weight puts strain on the joints and tendons.
I cut the squats and focus at one point on accuracy, another point and power, and in the middle on whether or not I can get the damn thing to let up.
Still: about 45 minutes total. Plenty of sweat. And I don’t feel as shitty as I did before working out even if I do feel way, way more tired.
Will, Session Six, 10:00pm
Weird — we’re not one week in and I’m worried about all of us keeping up with the challenge. However demanding my schedule may be, I can validate 30 minutes to a workout, and Supernatural’s easy-in actually does lessen the friction.
So I fired off another one today, “The Perfect Day.” It wasn’t perfect, as I still can’t get more powerful than 96%. But I admit, I’m going with the flow and really enjoy these songs. I generally know their maps and these are some of my favorite tracks of the last year. I call it a win-win. Soon after starting I’m forgetting that I have my design qualms.
This time, I actually tracked heart rate on my own. Setting my Samsung watch for a generic workout, my rate sat around 160bpm with a max at 192bpm. For 24 minutes flat, that’s pretty good for not knowing I’m at moderate level or higher. I haven’t checked these numbers against my Beat Saber days, but I’m curious enough to compare when I get the chance.
I think I’m settling into it. Minus the perfectionism and competitiveness my girlfriend highlights in my reactions, I’m enjoying hopping in to expect a workout and do it. It’s tiring me out, but not causing me to collapse. That’s a pretty hard balance to keep.
Speaking of the girlfriend, she loves it. We decide who goes in and when, and having multiple accounts on one device is a great feature. When she’s swinging she describes her core as “on fire,” and she’ll loudly curse the trainers for making her work (you can’t do that in an IRL class).
However having both of us pay the monthly fee when we have one Quest (mine) is a bit odd when a Quest is generally a personal device. But this might be a future-proofed income stream for when Quests are in-stock consistently.
The real test of this 30-day challenge is seeing if she or I get bored. I don’t think that will happen, as I’m noting a diverse array of trainer recordings, maps, and the like. But we have many more days to go. And my body is feeling fine while Meg’s is sore. If she makes it through, and her strength and endurance has improved, I’ll call Supernatural a success.
DAY SEVEN — MAY 1, 2020
Kathryn, Session Five, 1pm
Today’s workout session was made much more enjoyable by three things: discovering that I can turn the vocals of the coach down, that I can skip the workout intro, and that I can quit out of the workout early during the cool down session and still have the points “count.” All these features are hidden in the menu that pops up when I press the Oculus button of my left controller. That said, when one of the coaches tells me to “breathe” in the middle of a barrage of targets, I lose my focus for a moment. The volume bar here is like the iMessage progress bar: a lie. The most I can turn Leanne down is to 50%, unfortunately. I’ve also got the heart rate monitoring feature working consistently now, so long as my iPhone is awake and nearby when I’m in the Quest and I start the tracking from the phone and not my Apple Watch.
Today’s in hacking the Supernatural system: doing “Balance” with Leanne Pedante twice in a row because: it’s one of the shorter workout; I love Lizzo; and I’m enjoying repeating songs to better learn the patterns. And I find that some of the beat maps for these specific songs are really enjoyable as they are repeating the same patterns and it feels less like I’m being bombarded with random targets.
Logging into my Supernatural app later on, I see that the second workout of the day is still marked as “partial workout” despite doing the entire thing — this might be because I quit out of the app via the Quest’s menu instead of choosing “end workout” via the Supernatural menu. Oops.
Is anybody worried about their back and neck when using Supernatural? I’m not sure that my form is correct when I’m squatting towards the end of the workout as I struggle through the final song as I’m too busy looking at the oncoming onslaught of balloons; I’m also looking at Quest-specific counterweight head straps to help maintain balance better during my workouts. The Supernatural site has a bunch of exercise equipment that they recommend in conjunction, including fans and what not. I wish my fan wasn’t in storage at my folks’ house.
And… I’m also sensing that my skin hates having the headset on when I’m working up a sweat; there’s the beginnings of a breakout right at my hairline. Ugh. My complimentary VR headset sweat liner from Supernatural arrived today, though, so I look forward to trying it out!
Noah, Session Seven, 6:30 PM
Another low energy day but I decide to try out the new workout because one of my karaoke songs is in it. That would be Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl. I’ve been known to crush that one on the mic, so it makes a good calibration tool.
Having songs I know — this one and Fun.’s Some Nights — helps me understand the logic, or illogic, of the beat mapping. I feel like I can keep up with the targets because I know what’s coming next in the music, although I’m agreeing with Kathryn that a visual cue on the crossover targets would help.
So much of it still feels like FRANTIC ARM MOVEMENTS and not strength flow. My heart rate goes up high enough and my legs get sore enough that I back off from the fullness and at one point just focus on power.
Sometimes the workouts feel like they are adapting, sometimes they don’t. I keep wishing that it was possible to turn OFF the dynamic difficulty or limit the range. Because the reward for doing good on a song you know is just a sea of targets at a pace far beyond one’s ability.
There’s a term in improv: playing to the top of your intelligence. The equivalent here would be “playing to the top of your ability,” and I really, really wish that was a goal baked into this. Instead it feels like WITHIN’s goal is to challenge those who already are brilliant at Beat Saber.
Will, Session Seven, 6:00 PM
This is it: seven days and (over) seven routines logged. My girlfriend is now working almost every day with me, and overall it’s a positive chunk of her day. For me this challenge started frustrating, but it’s becoming much less-so. Noah and I did the same workout today, and he has good points above. Kathryn is also correct about lowering instructor volume (it’s silly to have it only go halfway). These issues to me are temporary and I foresee WITHIN fixing them in the near future.
The main issue here is that after a week I’m starting to peer into the system and its limits. Supernatural is a wonderfully-wrapped toy, but when I realize it has buttons not meant to work, the illusion peels back a bit to reveal how unfinished the experience is. WITHIN has always been the expert of visual fidelity, and that holds true here. It’s their understanding of underlying systems that constantly creeps up to bite them.
For example, after seven days I’ve repeated about 5–6 songs. If I didn’t try for more workouts, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed. But it’s becoming apparent that Supernatural wants us to believe they have unlimited musical tracks, only to repeat several in different orders. This is a common practice for services like Netflix to allude to larger libraries. If we’re going to do this every day, I’m hoping for variation or it’ll get boring quick.
Several folks I’ve talked to (including my girlfriend) have asked if the coaches are able to respond to your progress and use your heart rate stats to push you to go further or take it easy. Or, they hope the coaches respond actively to your performance. But this doesn’t seem the case — watching my girlfriend run the same songs as me points out how the instructors’ chime-ins are locked to the music. There’s nothing tailored at all.
WITHIN still has a way to go to show “customized” workout routines in this fashion. Unless that happens, I’m worried others will see a façade whether or not there is one. But there is good news: the community is growing, and others are joining the challenge to rule Supernatural. If WITHIN keeps momentum up, we’ll keep that challenge going. I’m excited for week two.
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