One suggestion we received was to add a live video of the user so they can see themselves during their workout. However, we were thinking this feature wouldn’t be necessary because of the group we are creating this product for. People are mostly working out at home right now, and using YouTube workout videos, but they mostly aren’t watching themselves do the exercises. I don’t think many home workouts are done in front of a mirror (at least according to people I’ve asked). We’re also concerned about how much latency this feature would add to our product.
Even if they did do the workouts in front of a mirror, we think that the ability to watch themselves during the workout will distract the users. To look up at the live video, the user will need to use incorrect form. This is something we don’t want to encourage the users to do, because incorrect form can lead to injuries over time because of strain caused to certain areas of the body. Also, during workouts, the users should be focusing on engaging the muscle groups that a particular exercise is targeting.
Maybe as a compromise, we could add an overview of the generated workout so that users can learn how to perform the exercises before the actual workout starts. This part of the product could be controlled by the user; as in, they could choose when to see the next exercise (press the next arrow key) so they can take as much time as they need to learn one exercise before seeing the next. This would also allow users to skip exercises they already know, so they can focus on learning only new exercise forms. In this, we could provide the same looped videos so the users can copy them. The users would be able watch the demo video, find a mirror (or we could provide the live stream video here), and try to mimic the demonstrator’s form correctly.