It's been 12 months since we announced that Paraic McGlynn at Cyclologic had taken an equity stake in Velogic and was coming onboard as CEO. Since then, we've been hard at work building a new version of Velogic Studio which will "blow the doors off" (Paraic's words) the bike fit systems landscape.

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‍The journey

Our major goals have been:

• Retaining Velogic Studio's ease-of-use and streamlined workflow
• Adding analysis and visualisations to help bring the rider, your customer, on the journey with you
• Better support for bilateral capture, giving you visibility on how changes are affecting symmetry.

The "bilateral capture" part has been by far the biggest piece of work. We started out by allowing bilateral capture from 2 x Kinect cameras, but due to the nature of those cameras, it's only possible to capture one side at a time.

That's good, but not good enough, so we committed to a new camera, the "Femto Mega" from Orbbec. It's based on Kinect Azure technology, licensed from Microsoft, and you could argue that it's the great-grandchild of the current "Kinect for XBox One" that we all know and love.

One of the most important features of the new Femto Mega camera is that it allows multiple simultaneous cameras connected to the PC. Further, it has onboard processing and a network port, which means we're able to use up to 4 cameras via a local network, with greatly simplified cabling compared to USB connections. In summary, this is the 3D camera we've been waiting for: it's powerful, it's supported, and we can use multiple of them!

We're in a final testing stage with the  Femto Mega camera, and assuming that goes well, we're planning to announce a major new release of Velogic Studio in December 2023. Because there are so many new features, we're not going to push this out through the normal upgrade channel. Instead, it's going to be called "Velogic Studio v4"; read on to see what's new and how it affects you.

What's new?

Here's a list of the new features coming in this release:

• Incorporation of separate left/right metrics throughout the app and report
• Multiple Kinect cameras: hot-swap between 2 Kinect cameras on each side of the rider, then merge the captures to review left & right between any 2 positions
• Multiple Orbbec Femto Mega cameras for simultaneous bilateral capture
• Stroke Analysis: we combine and intertwine frames from multiple pedal strokes into a virtual-high-framerate single pedal stroke.
• Instant visualisation of metrics; click on a metric to see a visualisation of what it's measuring, auto-seeking to the best frame in the capture
• New Ankling metrics: we added an (optional) 8^th marker, placed near the heel, to give a more accurate ankle angle figure (which doesn't vary with the size of the rider's foot)
• Easier comparisons between any 2 captures in a fit session, including synchronised "scrubbing" between any 2 paired video captures
• ... and many more quality and usability enhancements.

Essentials vs Pro product levels

You've all had many "we need to put up prices" emails over the past 2 years. We've staunchly resisted doing that, but now we find ourselves in a position where we're arguably the best, most fully-featured bike fit system on the market, and yet our prices are low-to-mid-market.

We wanted to raise our prices for new customers wanting the high-end features, but still remain the best option for smaller independant (but still professional) fitters. We also wanted to not raise prices for existing customers.

Our solution has been to come up with a new pricing structure for Velogic Studio v4, and to break it into two separate product levels.

• "Velogic Studio v4 Essentials" is the lower-level product. It does broadly everything Velogic Studio currently does and has access to the new analysis and visualisation technologies.
  
• "Velogic Studio v4 Pro" is the new higher-level product. The additional features available at this level are:some text
  • Simultaneous bilateral capture (requires 2 x the new Orbbec Femto Mega cameras)
  • Bikefinder integration (find suitable frames from bike measurements)
  • 3D Aero integration (when completed, targetting Q2 2024)
  • Frame Comparison promotion (fitters at this level will optionally be featured on our free Frame Comparison page, used by thousands of riders every month).

As always, don't hesitate to get in touch to find out more.