Open GoPro Spotlight: How REVER is Using Open GoPro to Reshape Its App Experience

In the wide world of motorsports, few companies have made as big of an impact on improving experiences as REVER. And with Open GoPro, that experience is getting even better.

Since its founding in 2015, REVER has been a destination for speed-seekers who want to create curated experiences when they go riding, whether that be on road, tracks or offroad trailblazing. The more than 1.5 million REVER users want to explore, take on adventures and have a way to easily capture their experiences. The latter is where GoPro comes in.

In the REVER app, users can plot adventures and find the best routes to explore with help from the growing REVER community, which is consistently updating routes and sharing helpful information. And as REVER co-founder Mark Roebke told GoPro in a recent interview, REVER quickly discovered that many of its users also owned GoPro cameras and wanted to capture video and photos when they were exploring. The problem? Sometimes they straight up forgot to turn their GoPro cameras on. Or they unintentionally capture an entire excursion when they may have only wanted certain parts.

With Open GoPro technology, REVER was able to address those pain points. With simple integration between GoPro and REVER, users are now able to automatically turn their GoPro cameras on and off, set zones to record video and more. REVER has utilized Open GoPro to reshape how people interact with its app.

And Mark says this is just the beginning for REVER and GoPro. Looking ahead, he’s excited about the opportunity to continue enhancing the app with integration features only Open GoPro can deliver.

Read on for our exclusive interview with Mark and the many compelling ways motorsport fans are revolutionizing the ways they enjoy experiences with REVER and GoPro.

What is REVER?

REVER is a mobile app and website for power sports enthusiasts. It is designed to inspire finding places to ride, track your riding experiences and share them with your friends.  Similar to other enthusiasts’ communities that are out there, REVER is that community for people that are into stuff with motors.

REVER has a wide range of features from finding places to ride to ride tracking. You can also attach photos and share them with family and friends. We also have super-curated routes, so if you’re in a certain state, we have places to go—you just follow that to help you create your own adventures. 

What can you say about Open GoPro and its integration with REVER?

The most enthusiastic power sports users are also GoPro users. It connects to that passion of: “I want to record this and show it to my friends.” We were immediately attracted to that and the ability to have a more seamless integration for recording adventures.

We wanted to try to address a few of the challenges of recording with GoPro while riding. One is just turning it on and off at the right times. There are so many times you forget to start recording just as easily you forget to stop recording, so you end up with a lot of extra video. And, I can’t tell you how many times somebody is sitting in front of their buddy with the camera mounted on a helmet saying, “Dude, is my camera on?”

We also made the integration location-based so users could set up on a map the areas they want to record with their GoPro. While they are in those zones, they automatically start recording and when they leave them, it stops recording so that there is no more run-on video. Arguably, you are just getting the cool stuff which is what most people want anyways.

How long did it take you to integrate Open GoPro with REVER?

The actual integration was really straightforward.  A lot of our development time was spent around testing—making sure that things were working as expected. The GoPro integration was the easier part.  

We actually filed a provisional patent against [the whole drawing of a zone on a map] process just because we’re not just drawing a circle or square that people can actually get really granular with the location … that was definitely the larger effort for us.

How do GoPro features work in REVER?

It’s really simple. You connect your GoPro and pair it with your app. You’ll then have a map in REVER and literally use your finger and draw a zone on the map and give it a name.

Before you go out on your REVER session, you just decide which one of those zones you want to be active. You can have all your favorite areas set up. You're riding over here one day and activate those zones, and you ride over there another day and make that active. That’s really all there is to it.

How do you plan to evolve the feature over time?  

Right now, it uses the camera’s existing settings, but we plan to let you change the settings with the zones. You can have a zone that has a different frame rate. Or you can have a zone that goes into time lapse. Because Open GoPro essentially gives you full control of the camera, there are a lot of really cool opportunities.

What we didn’t want to do was boil the ocean and make it super complicated.  We wanted to start with a simple use case. I think going forward, we have a lot of opportunities to do more and different fun things with your camera because the Open GoPro capabilities are so broad.  

Any last thoughts about the development process?

It really comes down to two keys things. One: An incredible amount of power because GoPro has really exposed almost everything you can do with the camera. And two: that it’s infinitely extensible, so if GoPro adds a feature to the camera, you can add it to REVER through Open GoPro.

It feels like the approach is future proofing. 

Learn more about Open GoPro here.