Three things sit at the front of the studio's tech radar in 2026. The studio adopts new tech only when there's a measurable user-facing or cost win — never for novelty.
Bet 1 — On-device computer vision for form correction
Running a small vision model directly on the phone to count reps and flag form issues without sending video to a server. Privacy-respecting, low-latency, zero ongoing inference cost. The tech is now production-viable on mid-range phones thanks to MediaPipe + the newest mobile NPUs.
Bet 2 — Rive over Lottie
For in-app interactive animation. Rive renders faster, file sizes are 10-15× smaller, and it supports proper state machines — not just keyframed playback. The studio is replacing Lottie in UltraFit360's onboarding flow first.
Bet 3 — View Transitions API
Now stable in Chrome and Safari. One CSS line gives a marketing site native app-like cross-document transitions. The studio is adding it to aptixlabs.com and the coach portal as a non-blocking enhancement.
Also tracking
- Scroll-driven CSS animations as a replacement for most JS scroll libraries
- AV1 as the new default codec for hero loops (30-50% smaller than H.265)
- llms.txt as the emerging manifest format for AI search crawlers
- WebGPU for browser-side inference of small models