What’s New With WIN? A Full Recap of the July App Update
July 20, 2022 by Ellie Martin
Austin, TX 一 Hey, WIN-ners! It’s been too long. After almost a year of silence, we’re happy to announce that the WIN blog is back and better than ever. Based on your feedback, we’ve made massive strides to our application since 2021 and have released 4 major updates since ーour most recent one just being released on July 7th.
If you’ve been training with WIN since then, you have most likely already uncovered all of the new features this update has to offer. But if you haven’t been in the headset recently, or maybe you have but still have a few questions, that’s okay! We’re going to break it down for you.
You Can Now Switch Your Batting Hand
Lefties, righties, ambidextrous users… we got you. You can now choose which controller you want to swing with. All you have to do is calibrate the bat and pull the trigger!
New At Bats Drill: Directional Hitting
Now, we know what you’re thinking. Directional Hitting isn’t even new, we’ve seen this before. And yes, that’s partially true. However, it was formerly just a tiny component of our Situational Hitting drill. But now, it’s a drill of its own where you can solely test your ability to hit the ball to different areas of the field.
New At Bats Drill: Directional Hitting
Now, we know what you’re thinking. Directional Hitting isn’t even new, we’ve seen this before. And yes, that’s partially true. However, it was formerly just a tiny component of our Situational Hitting drill. But now, it’s a drill of its own where you can solely test your ability to hit the ball to different areas of the field.
Check out a few key elements within the Directional Hitting drill:
• Nine different barrel control challenges
• New target-zone positions: the target zones now become smaller and tighter as they shift all around the field throughout the course of the drill.
• Scoring based on accuracy: partial points are now awarded to players for hitting the ball in the “buffer zones” which are located at the edge of the target zones.
Review Your Last Bunt
WIN users can now see the outline of both the bat and the ball as they bunt. If players missed on their bunt attempt, they can now identify whether they missed high or low. Likewise, hitters who made contact can take note of their bat positioning in hopes of replicating that as they continue to train.
Check Your Barrel Speed
When training in one of our controller-based hitting drills (controller only or utilizing the WIN Bat attachment), you can now see the estimated barrel speed within a 10mph range. Users were previously only able to view these metrics as simply a “high” or “low” speed.
Visual and Graphic Improvements
WIN developers are always working to improve the WIN Reality application to make it an even better experience for you. Obviously, the visuals and the graphic elements of our application play a significant role in doing that. This last month, we drastically enhanced the visual representation of the ball as it approaches during a pitch. The increased clarity, color saturation and resolution of the ball now makes even the physical seams of the ball visible. Players who routinely use the spin of the seams to understand pitch shapes and trajectories can now do just that in our app. It goes without saying that this upgrade is huge, because it leads us back to our original goal 一 providing users with training that looks and feels real.
Did you know that WIN Reality is now in the Meta Quest Store?
Prior to June 2022, the WIN Reality app could only be found in the Meta Quest App Lab, which acts as the housing domain for VR apps that are newer and considered to be relatively early in their development. The continuous evolution of our application granted us the stamp of approval from Meta, meaning that users can now find our app much more easily in the main store! So, basically we were playing in Triple-A and we got our much awaited call-up to the big leagues. A killer analogy right there if we do say so ourselves.
What’s Next?
Your feedback is what helps us continually improve and while we have a long list of updates and ideas on the horizon, there’s nothing more important to us than hearing from you. Email us, call us, hop in the chat box, or message us on Instagram. You can also join the WIN Reality Community on Facebook. WIN Reality was created not only by players but for players. So for now, stay tuned on what’s next. In the meantime, train hard, see as many pitches as possible and keep WIN-ning.
