SAN FRANCISCO — Nothing kills your resolve to stick to a diet or fitness routine quite like a lack of feedback. Scales can only tell you so much, especially if those pounds are turning from fat into muscle. And a typical mirror might let you know how you look right now, but not how that look compares to when you started working out.
That's the gap the Naked 3D Fitness Tracker hopes to fill. The mirror, available for a preorder price of $699, uses its built-in RealSense cameras to perform a full body scan so that you have a visual record of how your body changes to diet and exercise over time. Naked Labs expects to ship its body-scanning mirror in early 2017.
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A device with such a premium price tag would seem to be aimed at people who are serious about tracking their fitness progress. But Farhad Farahbakhshian, CEO and co-founder of Naked Labs, says that the fitness tracker is ideal for anyone who's committed to making a change in their lifestyle. Too often, committing to a new diet and exercise plan doesn't always show an immediate payoff, Farahbakhshian explained to me at a demo area during this week's Intel Developer Forum — a problem that the Naked 3D Fitness Tracker can address.
"People want to understand how their bodies change based on diet and exercise," Farahbakhshian said.
To get a 3D scan, you take your place on a turntable scale in front of the mirror, wearing only your underwear so that the cameras can get a good look at you. (The company didn't settle on the name Naked out of the blue.) As you rotate around, three RealSense cameras embedded in the mirror capture 3D images of your body that the mirror's quad-core Atom X5 processor stitches together into a scan of your body.
The mirror doesn't just capture a scan of how you look at a given point in time. It also calculates measurements for different parts of your body — your neck, shoulders chest, biceps, forearms, waist, hips, quads and calf muscles.
By recording that data so that you can view it on a companion mobile app, you get a better sense of how your diet and exercise choices are paying off. Maybe all that exercise isn't causing you to drop as many pounds as you thought you would, for example, but Naked's scan can show you how flatter your tummy has gotten, Farahbakhshian points out.
The Naked 3D Fitness Tracker may not be solely aimed at fitness obsessiveness or professional athletes, but it will require someone more dedicated than just the casual dieter, particularly with that price tag, which jumps to $999 after the pre-order period. If nothing else, the 3D body scanner shows off another possible use for Intel's RealSense technology, beyond games, drones and movement-tracking.
