Live Riders: The Infinite World Goes Multiplayer

When we launched the Infinite World, we said the next phase would be riding it with other people. That phase is here. The Infinite World is now a shared road: start an eRoute and the riders on it appear live in the 3D world beside you, riding their own trainers in real time.

Real riders, live

Start an eRoute with real-time riding on and anyone else riding that route shows up on the road at their true position and speed. Nameplates identify riders near you, and when someone is beyond nameplate range, edge pills pinned to the top and bottom of the screen show the nearest riders ahead and behind with live distance and time gaps, so you always know who is up the road and who is chasing.

A presence panel shows who is riding right now and lets you search for a specific rider. And you do not need the 3D world to ride together: in the classic 2D player, live riders appear as colored dots moving along the route map and the elevation profile, with the same edge pills.

Drafting that actually works

Sit on a wheel and you genuinely go faster. Shelter from the rider ahead reduces your effective aero drag, up to 27 percent right on a single wheel, and deeper still inside a paceline, where the effect climbs toward a 45 percent ceiling as the line gets longer. Because aero drag grows with the square of speed, the same shelter saves more watts the faster the group is moving.

The shelter is strongest directly behind the wheel and tapers off as the gap opens, disappearing entirely beyond about ten meters. A small draft bar on your rider shows the live shelter percentage and the watts it is saving you. A sticky-wheel model holds you on a wheel through ordinary power wobble instead of letting you drift through the rider ahead, and when you are ready to come around, a real surge pulls you out and past. Two honest boundaries: drafting only changes your virtual speed, never your trainer resistance or workout targets, and it applies to plain route rides only, so a structured workout ridden on a route stays exactly the workout you planned.

Pelotons and road manners

Riders at a similar pace form up into a bunch that holds real formation, filling tidy columns instead of wobbling through each other. The road has manners, too: alone you ride the center of the lane, you ease right to latch onto riders you catch, you give way right when someone faster comes up behind, and passes happen on the left. When a rider attacks out of a group, every screen sees the same move at the same moment. And from dusk through night, every rider carries a small red taillight, so an evening group reads like a real evening group.

Say hello out there

You can wave, send a quick preset message, or type a short line of chat, and it floats briefly above your rider in the world. Tap another rider to ring a cowbell just for them; in the 2D player a cowbell arrives as a toast so it is never missed. Comms are entirely optional: turn them off and no messages render at all.

Built safe for younger riders

Real-time riding requires a birthdate on your account, and the age check happens on our servers, not in the app, so it cannot be sidestepped. Riders under 18 never see free-text chat and cannot send it; they ride with the curated preset messages, waves, and cowbells only. Free-text bubbles are also limited to riders who follow each other, so a stranger's typing never appears over anyone's head.

On by default, private when you want

Real-time riding is on by default, so the riders you follow just show up beside you without anyone touching a setting. Your name follows your profile setting: a public profile is named to every rider on the road, while a private profile appears as an anonymous rider name to anyone unless the two of you follow each other. Only your live position on the route is shared while you ride. Turn it off any time in settings and you become invisible to other riders. The rooms themselves run at the network edge, close to the riders in them, so position updates stay quick everywhere.

Every rider, every route

Real-time riding is on for everyone. Start any eRoute and the other riders on it are there with you, live, unless you have switched off Enable real-time riding with others in settings.

How you see them follows the Infinite World itself. On our official Ride Cave routes, everyone rides the full 3D world together, for free, with drafting and comms and the whole scene. On your own routes and imports, Cave Crew gets that same full experience on every route, while a free account rides the classic 2D player. There the live riders move along the map and elevation profile as colored dots, with the same edge pills for the gaps ahead and behind, and the in-world comms and drafting readout stay with the 3D world.

This is the biggest step yet toward the Infinite World we set out to build. Next up: rider customization to make your rider your own, alongside fresh world themes and new 3D experiences. See you out on the road.