Riding at Roc d'Azur with ActiveLook

Riding at Roc D’Azur

Three weeks ago, I had the privilege of taking part in one of the greatest mountain bike racing events in the world: the Roc d’Azur. Aside from the beautiful Fréjus scenery and the convivial atmosphere, it was for me also a great opportunity to field test the latest ActiveLook products - the ENGO 2 sport glasses and our new Apple Watch-integrated app - in the toughest possible conditions.

First, full disclosure: I am a MicroOLED employee working on the ActiveLook project. Even so, I like to think I am fairly unbiased when it comes to sharing my experience as a product user.

I was honestly curious to see how the glasses would do on the crazy steep and bumpy downhills of the Roc d’Azur. I’ve been using them for running for a time and I wasn’t sure how they’d do on such rough terrain. Thankfully, they stayed put on my rather sweaty face for the whole 3-hour ride even without using the head strap. And because of the low weight – 36g – they stayed comfortable, too.

The experience was unique for a couple of reasons. First, it’s not every day that the developer of this type of technology gets to put it to use in some of the exact conditions under which it was meant to be used. And, then, once out in the field, it was gratifying to realize that the ENGO 2 really did change the way I managed my efforts during a very difficult race.?

Developers as Athletes, Athletes as Developers

At MicroOLED, a significant part of the ActiveLook project team happen to also be seasoned athletes and they love to test our protypes. I strongly believe this gives a delightfully unfair advantage to our business!??In all seriousness, being a dedicated user of a product you personally develop provides a real sense of ownership and a deep dedication to the project - it boosts the team motivation when aiming to achieve tough targets.?

However, there is, to me, a more important benefit.

When you work on a product at the bleeding edge of technology that will enable new use cases, you are confronted with two big problems:?

• technologies embedded in the product have given limitations which require making difficult choices
• there are no past user experiences to define product features?

I think the greatest benefit of being a power user of your own product is that it allows you to know with more certainty what the right choices are that need to be made. It also lets you know with more precision where you can safely compromise to achieve the end goal.

The ActiveLook team is lucky to have this rare combination of designers-users. This allowed the team to make what we believe are the right choices in terms of product design and also have extremely fast decide-change-test cycles

Getting Down and Dirty with ENGO

Another discovery I made was to realize how powerful this tool is as a means to motivate athletes to reach an objective. This has always been a value proposition we’ve put forward, but actually experiencing this was very rewarding.?

At Roc D’Azur, I mainly used the glasses to monitor my heart rate and manage my effort during what seemed to me a series of never-ending climbs – luckily, this worked as expected and I never over-exerted or wasted my efforts.

After riding about 90% of the race, I realized, from the data in front of me, that I might have a chance to finish the race in just under 3 hours. I decided I would give it a go, and started to give it everything I had. The closer I got to the finish line, the more I could see - in real time - that I had to push just a little bit harder on the pedals to reach my goal… and so I did. I was aiming at a moving target but the glasses stayed with me and delivered the data to motivate me to reach my target.??Result: 2 hours 58 minutes and 22 seconds!

So, after all the design and development, after all the choices and compromises, I found that yes, having real-time visual feedback does hand the power over to athletes to achieve their goals through an expanded knowledge and awareness that comes from real-time data. That was ENGOs main objective, and it’s validated. But underneath it all, the power also lies in the data’s other ability - to push, to motivate, to let the athlete know they can. I'm happy that I finally got to confirm this for myself, and it only took about 3 hours.??