Form Follows Function

It’s always a pleasure when I get the opportunity to write about topics that intersect my work and personal pursuits, and this blog piece is a chance for me to dive into a discussion about a device that fits the bill nicely: the Form Smart Swim 2 goggles.

It’s a product that does what it says on the tin: it takes a pair of swimming goggles and makes them smart. However, it’s not just a case of adding the ability to count lengths or track an open-water swim, although these are features; the Form goggles have a monocular heads-up display that actively guide you through a swim workout and help you to improve your aquatic abilities.

What does this look like? Well, in the most literal sense, it’s a simple matrix-dot style display, meaning that swimmers can receive a whole host of feedback about their swim in real time. This includes heart rate, captured through a sensor positioned on a wearer’s temple, elapsed time per length and for the overall swim, pace and even specific metrics like stroke rate.

It’s this specific metric piece that’s the most interesting. Form measures a range of inputs from each swimmer and provides specific guidance about how to improve each of these, coaching the user and helping them to boost their efficiency in the water. This is then aggregated into a singular Form score, which the goggles are designed to help improve over time.

I’ve been testing the goggles out, with the device detecting that I need to improve my “time to neutral” metric, meaning the speed with which I return my head to the water after breathing, as well as my “head pitch”, referring to the angle at which I’m looking ahead through the water.

What’s truly impressive is the way the Form goggles can coach this during workout. For head pitch, the goggles can show you in real time whether you need to adjust your head up or down in the water. It’s an amazing way to bring personalized coaching insights, which are backed by Olympic-level athletes working at Form, to individuals as they try to improve their technique.

A quick side note here about the visual experience: I wear glasses for distance and found that my weaker right eye struggled ever so slightly with the display — fortunately you can just flip the goggles and switch eye, which works great for me as I’ve got a stronger left eye. However, Form doesn’t offer prescription options at the moment, which may be a limiting factor for some people.

I’m continuing to use the Form goggles regularly and hope they’ll help me to improve my swimming in time for my next athletic challenge, which is a triathlon in April. Long-time followers of the CCS Insight blog will know that I love testing out wearables for training and racing, and the Form goggles feel like an excellent piece of my arsenal as I work toward that goal.

Still, this isn’t meant to be an article about my personal exploits, and I think there’s also a fascinating dynamic at play with the Form goggles that could tell us quite a lot about what comes next for head-worn devices. There’s a whole world of discussion going on about virtual and augmented reality and the ways that the technology can best suit a range of uses in both the consumer and enterprise markets. I won’t get into all that right now, but the Form goggles are a fascinating case study.

Why? Because this is a product purpose-built for a particular application, meeting the needs of a specific user group. We’ve all seen the glitzy futuristic images of what augmented reality could be — holographic projections of conference calls and so on — and the Form goggles absolutely do not offer this. Instead, they zero in on the needs of a well-defined group of users, and arguably this results in a better product that solves their needs.

After all, in the water, users don’t need 3D graphics. They need a readout of key metrics and data, in a product design that suits the activity and comes with the benefit of helping them to improve. Incidentally, talking to Form, it’s notable that the company also benefits from the behaviours of swimmers and triathletes, who are often data-hungry users looking for the latest technology to help their training — and are willing to pay for it.

On that front, the Form Smart Swim 2 goggles cost $249, but are currently on Black Friday sale at $199, with the first generation still available at $129. The goggles will work “out of the box” at no additional cost for real-time swim and metric tracking, but some advanced features, like guided workouts and training plans to help swimmers improve, are available as part of a Premium subscription at $15 per month or $119 per year.

So, altogether, what’s my takeaway from using Form’s goggles? Well, in my view, this feels like the broad next step that augmented reality needs to take. This more stripped-back technical approach is often labelled as assisted reality, and I think there’s huge potential to apply this to specific uses in the same way that Form has done. Other segments of the sports markets are an obvious bet, and this is one of the reasons that I recently predicted that we’ll see a pair of smart Garmin cycling glasses featuring a display in the coming years.

After all, I remain sceptical that “true” augmented reality is likely to arrive for some time. Our market forecast sees only limited opportunity for these devices over the coming years, and as I recently wrote, even the most exciting concept products right now, like the Meta Orion glasses, remain a relatively distant reality.

As such, I think Form has struck on something very cool with its Smart Swim goggles, and the template we’re seeing here could well be borrowed by emerging players in the head-worn device space over the coming years. I’ll be putting them through their paces, and will be keeping an eye out for other similar concepts on the horizon.