Augment Your Biceps: How AR is Going to Make Exercising Awesome
The death of gamification and turning workouts into playtime
The future of gaming is augmented reality.
On the cusp of 2014, the biggest tech buzz is Google Glass. Recognize that it represents only a first foray into the art of augmented reality. The interest in AR goes beyond the social; we want access to it on a personal, intimate level.
That gamification word will go extinct, because we’re going to play games on practically the same level as breathing.
Much ado continues to be made regarding our shrinking attention span, and yet: how much time have you invested in getting to the next Candy Crush level? Our heads are hackable in this way, susceptible to even “pointless” challenges like endlessly matching colored sweets on a screen if they’re balanced with the right reinforcement.
With the advent of widespread AR, we’re going to be able to harness this power for our own good. Games are going to be what finally gets us eating right and exercising. We’ll learn better and work better with them. We’ll connect on ever-more and deeper levels with the world around us, engaging in a dynamic, digital web of culture superimposed on tangible reality.
The even better part: this march towards high-mindedness is inevitable, because it’s all going to be too much fun not to play in our AR world.
Welcome to the first in a series of four ARticles (… forgive me). This one deals with an introduction to Augmented Reality, plus how it will affect the world of health and fitness.
Get ready to game.
Google Glass: no longer just for geeks.
The four new frame designs burst onto the scene on the same day as the writing of this article, and suddenly the prospect of wearable tech looks… normalizable, if not downright stylish.
There are other AR devices out there running in parallel to Glass, of course — I’ll give a nod to CastAR (for the tabletop gamer), SeeThru (for the privacy-conscious), and Meta Space Glasses (for Tony Stark, apparently).
Whether the salient gadget is Glass or a competitor (… iSight?), we’re not far from a future wherein depending upon a smartphone as one’s primary device is considered passé. The big shift: instead of using a device as reference point external to the tangible world, we’ll experience the digi-bells and whistles superimposed directly onto our reality.
The impending ubiquitousness of AR will bring about a playful revolution in how we interact with what’s around us.
Problem: Working out and eating right is a slog.
There’s huge money in making folks concerned about fitness believe otherwise. For the majority, though, engaging in regular exercise and good nutrition comes down to fighting against a tide of apathy, boredom, and impatience.
One of the biggest psychological issues with sticking to a fitness routine is the externalities — the tediousness and time investment of tracking, for instance.
There’s also the fact that doing the same thing again and again is absurdly boring, and that’s exactly what you need to do in order to train your muscles into shape.
We’re too impatient to bear witness to the long-term benefits of good habits. When bulging biceps refuse to emerge after a handful of weeks at the gym, we slack off, then abandon the ruse altogether, all but fusing with the couch cushions.
Eating healthy is no fun either. When your only weapons are carrot sticks, it’s a battle you’re doomed to lose.
Solution: Don’t work out, play.
Fitness trackers (Fitbit, Jawbone UP, the Nike band, Basis, etc. etc.) make it more obvious than ever that quantification works, and way more so when we don’t have to do it ourselves. These bands are already on their way out as smartphones get savvy to using the built-in accelerometer to accomplish the same thing. Google code-in-development already reflects this trend.
Tracking will become even more sophisticated, monitoring not just your activity and sleep patterns, but also your running glucose levels and the precise nutritional content of what you’re consuming.
In other words, our devices will know exactly how to optimize what we consume/perform at any given time in order to reach our fitness goals.
Our AR devices will scan the menu and advise us to pick the tuna tataki. Or we’ll get a suggestion of Thai stir-fry takeout that can be waiting for us when we get home. Or we’ll indicate a craving for chicken, scroll through suggested recipes that match our current nutritional needs, and auto-order the complimentary roasemary, tomatoes, and olive that are missing from our pantry. Oh hey, you’ve earned the Chicken Provençal badge, plus leveled up your knife skills in the process.
In terms of exercise, we’re already seeing apps like Zombies, Run!, which turns your dull-as-dirt jogging route into a wasteland infested by the undead (hey, to each his own).
The VR solution — admittedly cool — is to submerge you entirely within a virtual world and let you run amok. Vituix’s Omni treadmill uses the Oculus Rift headset to set you inside any game also compatible with the Oculus, which includes geek favorites Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2. As Geekosystem’s Victoria McNally writes, “Hope you like running around and shooting at things — wait, of course you do. Forgive me.”
While definitely compelling, the VR solution gets stuck on one major problem: it takes you entirely outside of reality. That is, you’ve got to actually make the decision to get up and use it, just like you’ve got to make the decision to get up off your tukhus and hit the weights now — and we all know how often that happens. We humans are determinedly lazy beasts, and will take playing with a controller over our own two feet any day.
The solution is AR. Turn life itself into your gym and watch how you level up.
I’m envisioning a device that scans what’s around you in terms of makeshift gym materials, anytime, anywhere. That rock over there looks about the right size to fit in a few deadlifts. Gimme 20 lunges to cross the plaza. There’s a bike-sharing station nearby and it’s sunny; catch a ride down to the beach for a quick 100 cal burn.
I can see cities encouraging their denizens to keep in shape by placing fitness stations in unused corners, a kind of update to the jungle gym-like structures you find in parks. Accomplishing varying feats on their bars and bands will equate to different levels; execute ten perfect chin-ups to reach Level 7 in Lats/Biceps!
Of course — the real leveling up is in our own muscles, our own bodies. But shhh, we don’t need to tell ourselves that. Fitocracy works wonders this way, but it’s a tool isolated from the experience itself. AR is going to modify the act of exercise at the origin, integrating it into our lives in the most playful way possible.
