Meta’s Layoffs Leave Supernatural Fitness Users in Mourning

My fists flail, punching the air as sweat drips from my VR headset . I hear a stranger’s heavy breathing through the rollicking dude-bro anthem blasting my eardrums, courtesy of the pop-rock band Imagine Dragons. Me and two people I just met are punching digital blocks that fly at our heads in the VR workout platform Supernatural . We’re breaking in, shaping up. My new friends have nameplates floating above their heads that say Chip and Alisa. That’s all I know about them. When the song ends, we each rest our respective real-life bodies, who knows how far apart, out of breath. This workout had us weaving, jabbing, and hitting lots of flying blocks for points. I feel it in my bones. While I nearly punched the TV in front of me several times, I missed many of the digital blocks I was supposed to hit. That brought our group score down. I wipe my brow and start to apologize. They quickly stop me. “It’s OK,” Alisa says. “We’re all in this together.” ”I always say,” Chip says, “if I miss ’em, as long as I swung at ’em I’m still getting a workout,” His avatar gives me a high five. I grin. Then we all punch more blocks together. All Systems Go Supernatural is a virtual reality fitness subscription service available on Meta Quest headsets. It works like a mix of Peloton and Beat Saber . Users pop into beautiful virtual locations like the French Alps, then join lessons narrated by exuberant coaches who guide them through rhythmic boxing matches or more flowy dance sessions. Released in 2020, Supernatural was consistently one of the best-performing apps in Meta’s VR app store, and it was widely hailed as a flagship app for the medium. But Meta’s widespread layoffs this week to its Reality Labs division included cuts at Supernatural, though the number of people at Supernatural who have been affected is still unclear. While Supernatural’s service is not ending yet, the platform will no longer receive any updates like new songs or workout lessons. In emailed responses to questions from users shared with WIRED, one of the remaining Supernatural representatives wrote that the current $100-per-year price of the service’s subscription will not change, even though there are no plans for new content. For many of Supernatural’s users and avid fans, this is it, the apocalypse. “This just feels like a gut punch,” says Stacey Goff Johnson, a Supernatural user who credits the service with helping her lose more than 100 pounds and improve her blood pressure over the course of two years. “It can't all just be AI, AI, AI.” The reported reason for Meta’s rejiggering of its finances is to shovel funds into the company’s forays into artificial intelligence like its Meta AI platform and its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. Meta is also shoring up its so-called superintelligence lab to build the next generation of AI tools. The thing Goff Johnson will miss the most from this shake-up...

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