The Metaverse will be a virtual world where we can interact, explore and play. In that surrounding, Andy Hall and his Team at OliveX want to merge fitness, gamification, and NFT-based incentives. Their vision of the "Fitaverse" could entice a new generation of virtual health-seekers.
How do you explain the core of OliveX to your children?
It's a virtual world where you have the opportunity to socialize, interact, play games, and be rewarded through cryptocurrency. Imagine playing a virtual football game, you win to unlock a special yellow jersey and you can then carry this jersey across games to give you upgrades in other games too.
How do people enter the Metaverse?
I think the metaverse is a shared digital space for three key essential parts of our life: education, entertainment and work. With this in mind, this makes entry points to the metaverse limitless. Virtual reality glasses won't be the only way to enter it. We are building our Fitaaverse in Sandbox. There, similar to Minecraft, you have an avatar and play a game. You do that on a web-based browser on your phone or you just have an app like in our game, "Zombies, Run!". It's accessible to absolutely anybody with a smartphone. In the next couple of years, VR, AR, and AI glasses will be part of that strategy. But accessibility is what's important right now.
What does fitness look like in the metaverse?
We're in the process of designing those mini-games at the moment, for example, footgolf. You're playing footgolf with your avatar on a mini-course that we've designed with one of our partners. There'll be an objective or a challenge to be rewarded at the end of each session.
How will the Metaverse shape the fitness industry?
We tap into the blockchain and the gaming communities that don't necessarily interact with the fitness brands currently. This opens up a whole new target audience for fitness brands and our partners to come in and engage with. The Fitaverse is a place for us to introduce our products, as well as our fitness partners. And the overall goal for all of us is to get more people into more active and healthy lifestyles.
What will the OliveX community look like tomorrow?
The idea behind OliveX is that we have lots of USPs from the fitness, health, and wellness industry. Our prospects and potential users or communities in the future will have different needs and wants. If we can bring as many USPs to the fitness Metaverse as possible, we're going to engage with all those different personality types. So whether it's fitness, clothing, nutrition, or wellness - there's something for everybody. As a decentralized platform, we want it to be open and want to engage with as many people as possible.
Andy Hall is a true FitTech veteran. He entered the fitness world as a trainer, moving to Fitness First, TruBe, and later working for EGYM and Les Mills. For the past two years, as Head of Commercial, he's been helping OliveX build the Fitaverse - an amalgamation of fitness, NFT-technology, gaming, and the Metaverse.
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OliveX: Connecting the dots for the FItaverse
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Currently, you are entering many collaborations with software and fitness companies. What is the main goal of these?
The partnership side of the fitness industry is really important to us. We're helping companies transition into the metaverse. If a company fits the model, and there's an investment opportunity or incubation opportunity, we will look at that and move forward from there. There are a lot of investments and partnerships that we've gone through over the last 12 months - like Defy labs, Genopets, Les Mills, and Gold's Gym.
Another collaboration you've started is the one with Gym Aesthetics. Tell us more...
They have a very strong brand and strong ambassadors within their community as well. So having an engaged fitness community is really important to our fitness landscape and to the success of some of our products and investments. Gym Aesthetics is now bringing out a Metaverse range of clothing. And from there, we've launched a cryptocurrency-based fitness token with DOSE. Upon earning DOSE, you can use the currency to buy clothing and other tangible goods.
What could the virtual gym in the Metaverse look like?
I think it's really important to align with the real world. You will have a virtual gym, where you pay for membership with NFTs. You will be rewarded with the DOSE token when you complete objectives in the gym which relate to the exercises that you offer in the real world. But also, the DOSE token might be used in lots of local gyms as well, whether it's your membership, PT sessions, or nutrition supplements.
In which ways can a gym benefit from a Metaverse-user?
When a gym owner replicates his gym in the Metaverse, they will have the blueprints of themselves as a virtual gym. You can replicate some of the classes and movements that you do in a gym, too. This might help gyms to reach out to people that aren't quite ready for the real-world gym. They'd get familiar with some of the movements and some of the classes in the metaverse and then potentially try it in the real world. If you have points within your gym already, they could be converted to DOSE tokens which can be used across numerous different platforms.
What are OliveX' main goals at the moment?
Our focus right now is on building our community, but the education side of it is really important too. We're doing a lot of webinars and events and speaking at events to educate the b2b world, about what the metaverse will bring and what the benefits potentially are. It's a small percentage of companies that are able and willing to make the transition to the metaverse right now. For many, digitization has been part of their strategy over the last couple of years and those initiatives are still in progress. But, that doesn't mean they can't learn and be educated and know who to go to in the future.
FitTech Club at your fingertips: Unleash our superpower. For you!
Andy and many other visionaries are members of the FitTech Club, a global business club for the movers and shakers in the fitness, health, sports, wellness and technology industries. In the Club, you will find C-level leaders of established companies along with mid-size business wonders, early-stage and scale-up founders and investors interested in the space.
Your benefits:
- Inspirational networking with like-minded peers.
- Opportunities for business growth
- Cross-industry insights and future trends
Most of the customers are from Asia. Is your target group more hyped for the Fitaverse compared to Europeans and Americans?
There's definitely a hype in Asia at the moment and some big players in Asia are driving that. There, the questions and the conversations are very progressive and forward-thinking. But we're catching up in Europe and it's certainly becoming more prominent in other regions like Europe, US, or Australia.
What is OliveX building virtually right now?
Our Metaverse is within the Sandbox world. Whatever they offer is what we do. At the moment, the gameplay is restricted to simple movements and simple mini-games. That's going to grow a lot. In the Sandbox world, we have a twelve-by-twelve piece of land. Currently, we're only building on a two-by-two piece, so it's quite a small section of our land. But even that piece of land with your avatar will take two to three minutes to walk across. First, we want to build the fitness metaverse. Second, we'll build the Dustland world, a version of our Dustland products. Then, potentially, we're speaking to some Olympic federations, to build an Olympic village as our third phase.
What factors in the next few years will decide if the metaverse is becoming a thing?
I'm very confident it will be. The $10 billion dollars Meta is spending on the Metaverse is significant. When you look at NF T's and the crypto world, billions have been spent over the last 12 months. With OliveX, we will be part of the Animoca brands ecosystem, a $5 billion blockchain gaming company. They are kind of holding our hand from a resources and knowledge perspective and we feel good about that.
What will the Metaverse do that the real world missed so far?
The potential with the metaverse is: There's no ceiling. You can do what you want. If you own a piece of land, you can build whatever you want and create any game you want. You've always got limits in the real world where you need planning permissions. In the Metaverse, you can build up as high as you want. You can go down low and wide as you want. And you can bring all these different features that will evolve over the coming years. Your imagination is the ceiling.