Infinite World: Ride Anywhere on Earth in 3D

The world can feel like a small place until you start riding your bike. In the real world you can explore every nook and cranny your wheels can safely roll to. In Ride Cave, you can now explore even more.

Today we are announcing Infinite World: any spot on earth, experienced as a beautiful, scenic 3D ride. We have stripped away buildings and human presence and replaced them with natural, geographically accurate scenery and sound. There are no power boosts and no glowing bike frames. This is pure riding, anywhere in the world, with panoramic views and real mountain vistas.

Best of all, every data view you have built or customized just works in Infinite World. Your complications overlay the scene exactly as you designed them, and you can still attach a structured workout to an eRoute to train while you ride the outdoors, indoors.

Three Ways In

There are three ways to experience Infinite World. You can ride any existing eRoute, and while older routes still work, many will benefit from importing them again now that we have improved how we correct bridge crossings. You can choose Ride Anywhere to generate a route on demand, now with more realistic, bike-friendly routing that keeps you on rideable roads and off the freeway, even if you try to steer onto one. Or you can import a new route, using import processing that is much better than it used to be.

A Living World

Infinite World runs a full day and night cycle about every two and a half hours, so each ride takes a slice of the day. Dawn and dusk are moody and orange, midday is warm and bright, and a long ride can carry you into a crisp, moonlit night.

Weather rolls through on its own. You might get a clear bluebird day, a passing shower, an overcast and moody sky, a properly wet ride, or a full downpour with lightning and thunder. When a storm is heavy enough, you see the flash and then hear the thunder a beat later, the way distance actually works. Climb high enough and the rain turns to snow above the snow line.

The scenery is drawn from eight biomes based on real land cover: coastal, desert, grassland, forest, tropical, boreal, alpine, and tundra. They blend into one another the way real country does, so the world shifts around you as your route crosses from one into the next. Bridges appear where real bridges cross valleys and canyons, and water appears where lakes, rivers, and coastline actually exist.

You can also turn on ambient sound in the world: wind, crickets at night, birdsong that changes with the biome, and the metallic tick of your freewheel whenever you stop pedaling. It is all optional, under the Ambient audio setting.

Real Physics, Carried Over

The same Newtonian physics that power our existing rides carry straight into Infinite World. As you coast down a mountain hairpin, you will not blast through the turn at an impossible speed. Instead you feel a brief, progressive slowdown into the corner, the way you would in real life. It makes every route more practical and more fun.

As you pedal, your rider's legs turn at exactly the cadence you are turning yours. Your speed shows up in the world too, with pale streaks that stream off your back and grow longer and brighter the faster you go, so you always feel the motion.

When you import an activity that has power data, we create a Ride Along from it, so you can ride alongside a ghost of the rider who produced that power. That power is run again through the very same physics engine as a live Ride Cave ride, so it is simulated against the virtual world rather than replayed as raw outdoor speed. The result is a fair pace, measured against the exact physics you are riding right now.

The Ride Cave Map Service

To build Infinite World, we built our own map service. The terrain you ride over, the elevation numbers behind your training, and the routes we generate for Ride Anywhere all run on infrastructure Ride Cave owns and operates, not rented from an outside provider. It is built entirely on open data, from OpenStreetMap to the EU's Copernicus satellites to national laser surveys, with attribution kept visible and the explicit right to store, correct, and reuse what we render.

That gives us some of the sharpest elevation data openly available anywhere. We have assembled meter-scale, laser-surveyed terrain everywhere open LiDAR reaches: the United States and Canada, Europe and the Nordics, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, up to ten times finer than the satellite data most platforms run on, with the rest of the world falling back seamlessly to global satellite terrain. Where that laser data exists, your climbing and grades are measured against real ground, even under forest canopy, where satellite elevation has always read the treetops.

The data is open to anyone. The pipeline is not: the bridge and canyon correction, the biome engine, and the world renderer are ours, and they get sharper with every ride. Owning the whole stack means no vendor can meter your exploration or change the terms out from under us. You can read the whole story of the Ride Cave Map Service.

What eRoutes Really Are

It is worth remembering what an eRoute is. It is not a perfect copy of the real road. Even when you upload your own route, we do a fair amount of processing to strip out GPS noise and satellite artifacts. The result is a very good approximation, but you will notice differences.

A sharp, abrupt climb in the real world can get smoothed out. Routes that loop back on themselves can produce visual artifacts or odd intersections. Where we have satellite imagery but no LiDAR, tree canopy can read as ground elevation, so you may find yourself riding through a thick valley that is really a forest. Land use is hit or miss, so you might see forest where there is actually a city. And biomes occasionally miss, so you may spot a cactus somewhere cacti do not belong.

You will also only ever see your own route. The road under your wheels is rendered, but the crossroads, junctions, and side streets that branch off it in the real world are left out, so your path runs alone through the landscape rather than weaving through a wider network of roads.

We have also kept the props in the world to a minimum on purpose, to balance immersion, aesthetics, and performance.

Speaking of Performance

Ride Cave lets you ride in 3D in a browser and in native apps across Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows. Making one immersive world run well across that whole range took serious engineering.

Infinite World tunes itself to your hardware. It reads your device type and constantly watches frame rate, and on phones it dynamically scales rendering to hold a smooth, steady frame rate as conditions change. Desktops start at High quality and most phones start at Medium. You can also pin the quality yourself and drop to Low on an older device. As quality steps down, the world sheds detail: fewer props, fewer shadows, and lighter effects.

The payoff is real. On a Google Pixel 7, pacing the frame rate cut battery drain by about 31 percent compared with an earlier build, while holding a flat, steady frame rate through the ride. That is the kind of efficiency that makes a long mountain ride on a phone genuinely practical.

Phase 1 of 3

This was only the first phase. Phase two has since shipped: live riding with other people in the same world. Later phases add rider customization to make your rider your own, new procedurally generated 3D experiences, fresh world themes, and new rider skins, among a few other things we are excited about.

Cave Crew

We think Infinite World is unlike anything else out there, and this is just the start. Every Cave Crew member can ride Infinite World starting today, and we will keep adding to it over the coming weeks, ahead of the Northern Hemisphere's indoor season.

As part of this release we are also refining how eRoutes are experienced across tiers. Everyone gets our full eRoute maps, and can experience the Infinite World on our official Ride Cave routes. Cave Crew rides in the Infinite World on every route by default. You control it under Settings > Preferences > Infinite World (3D). Free and Cave Crew get the exact same eRoute, and the only difference is how you experience it. When live group riding arrives, Free and Cave Crew riders will still be able to ride together.

We hope you enjoy Infinite World, and find some exciting new places to explore.