Kinneta shows off VR fitness workouts that take the boredom out of exercise

Kinneta, a New York-based extended reality (XR) company, is showing off its XR treadmill and bike apps that take people into more exciting workouts.

At the Augmented World Expo (AWE) show in Long Beach, California, the company is showing off its virtual reality and augmented reality solutions for replacing boring and repetitive cardio workout with XR fitness apps that pair people with top fitness trainers.

The apps enable people to safely exercise one-on-one with top fitness trainers at breathtaking sites worldwide.

Alternatively, users can bring Kinneta’s pro trainers to their home or gym as photorealistic holograms for a private class. The app was released in the Meta Store in partnership with major treadmill and cycling brands, Woodway and WattBike, who are bringing their machines to AWE 2025.

“Our gamified experience for the bike has a game where users punch and dodge targets with their body and arms to the beat of the music while they are pedaling the bike,” said Jenna Arndt, cofounder and head of fitness at Kinneta, in an interview with GamesBeat. “What’s really cool about this is that we’ve actually enabled connected mode so the users’ pedaling directly impacts the score of their workout. The closer they are to hitting the beat, the bigger their score is going to get. So that’s one of our main new products.”

At AWE, the company will debut gamified workouts for Xreal AR glasses, where bike users go through competitive full-body mobility rhythm-based challenges, in which alignment of the user’s cadence on the WattBike with the beat of the song gives the user powerups in the game, said Arndt.

Arndt said, “This is going to be available both in VR and AR, so at the conference, we’ll be showing it on the Meta Quest as well as on the Xreal glasses. And then, addition to that, we have our other new product — trainer-led scenic moving workouts. We’ll be debuting a trainer leading the user through Central Park.”

The company will also debut groundbreaking VR tech for Meta Quest headsets, that takes users on a photorealistic 3D trainer-led Central Park run with automatic Woodway treadmill speed and incline adjustments, where the VR movement precisely replicates the movement on the fitness machine. The team can adjust the difficulty of the workout, like whether it’s going uphill or not. The visuals are pretty realistic and so they can hold the user’s attention. And using good capture equipment, Kinneta can reproduce the great visuals in XR. The stats come from the machine and can be analyzed in the app.

And the company will announce a new big partnership with TrueForm.

For the moment, most players are home XR users. But over time, the company hopes more gyms will offer the equipment for their members, Arndt said. Equinox, a gym company, has hundreds of gyms and it is considering rolling it out.

“Everybody’s waiting for lighter headsets, less expensive headsets, and higher resolution,” said Polokhin.

Origins

Ilya Polokhin, CEO of Kinneta, began working with VR motion simulators back in 2014, after managing operations in automotive and retail for 15 years. He started a U.S. VR simulation center, Hubneo VR Lab, in 2017. Then he cofounded Octonic with David Wen, the chief engineer of Kinneta, in 2020. His main hobbies are VR gaming and long-distance running, and he decided to marry them.

Wen has more than eight years of experience working on everything from full-stack applications to system-level operations and AI. He has been in VR development with Unity since joining Polokhin at Hubneo VR Lab in 2017. Outside of work, David is a competitive strategy game player and Expert+ Beat Saber regular.

Nahiyan Ahmad, cofounder and head of business development, was previously played key roles at Jump Into The Light, a VR center in Manhattan, where he also produced creative content alongside artists like Bill Pullman and Patricia Field. He has more than seven years of experience in the XR space.

And Arndt has over 12 years of experience in the health and wellness industry. She was a founding team member at several boutique fitness studios across New York City and spent nearly a decade at Swerve Fitness, where she served as Head Trainer and VP of Fitness Programming.

Starting in 2021, Polokhin and Wen used their expertise to build a locomotion solution for fitness treadmills.

“It was a good combination of our technical expertise in VR and passion,” Polokhin said. “So the idea was that we would actually allow people to run on a fitness treadmill or bike on a site like stationary cycle while they’re in virtual reality. So that’s how it all came together.”

The team has eight people. That’s a small team, considering some of the competition includes Peloton, which sell a lot of fitness treadmills.

“The competition for us is more changing the mindset of people, rather than any other XR startup that is trying to do something in the fitness industry identical to us,” Polokhin said.

The company has a subscription model for $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, said Wen. AR has a lot of tailwinds right now as AR glasses are being married with generative AI, which is taking off due to all of the excitement around AI and Apple’s move into mixed reality headsets.

“We’re waiting for another generation of Apple headsets,” Polokhin said. “We want to open up more and more different experiences.”

Right now, Kinneta has more than 50 different environments — locations where people can travel to — and many of the company’s workouts are themed, Arndt said. The core of the IP is that the app connects with bikes and treadmills. The company has raised $1.5 million to date, including $250,000 recently from Woodway, a fitness brand.