Get Your Virtual Groove On
This was going to be an article about all of the neat VR fitness apps out there for you to try. I was going to put on a pair of spandex pants (or whatever mystical fabric Lulu Lemons are made of), wrap a towel around my neck, and get sweaty in the name of reviews.
Hammer & Tusk has recently decamped to greener pastures, and those pastures have a gym. But treadmills and ellipticals are, notoriously, boring. There are some great sweat-inducing games for the Vive (try Audioshield or Jeeboman if you’re looking for something fun that gets your heart rate up), but our Vive is in the middle of our office, in a room with glass walls, and it’s a communal piece of equipment. As you can imagine, I’m a little awkward about sweat stains.
A coworker suggested we slap on some cardboards or our Daydream and take the VR experience upstairs, to the room designated for sweat stains. What a great idea, I thought! I could write an article about the five best fitness apps, I thought!
I thought wrong.
First, I scoured the internet for articles reviewing fitness apps so I could choose the best to try for myself. Pickings were slim. There were plenty of articles about treadmills for VR experiences — as in, a proprietary treadmill. So I moved on to bicycles. Same problem — lots of people are designing equipment and selling it to gyms, which, while an awesome notion, is completely useless if you already have a gym nearby/own your own bike/are locked into a twenty five year contract that you can only get out of if you sell your firstborn child.
My next stop was the Play Store. I put in “VR fitness,” “VR gym,” “VR treadmill,” and a handful of increasingly silly search terms in the vain hope that I might find something I could use. The first several apps that came up were all designed to be used with proprietary equipment. A couple others had reviews that just stated, “This doesn’t work,” some of which were also designed to be used with proprietary equipment, and the users clearly didn’t understand that.
Finally, finally, I found a single app that described itself as being (all typos are pulled directly from the description) “For VR gamers and who love cycle on cycle exercise machines at home or gym.” Okay. Grammar aside, I figured I would give it a go.
I installed the app and put it into my cardboard. The game mechanic was pretty simple. You hold down on the phone to make yourself “move” while you cycle in real life. Why they thought requiring you to leave your hand pressed on the screen the entire time is beyond me. Considering that my cardboard has no strap, that meant that one hand was holding the device while the other poked the device, and every time I pumped my legs up and down my whole head wobbled and the device careened around, and basically 20 seconds later I was so sick I gave the whole thing up in disgust.
My coworker neatly summed up the situation. “I feel like it shouldn’t be this hard.”
But, wait. Why is it this hard?
It sounds like it should be a simple thing, and a popular one at that! Gym culture is huge in North America, with billions of dollars being spent every year on health and wellness products. And in theory, a treadmill should fix a basic problem with virtual locomotion. Your body is moving, which should mean that you could introduce motion into VR experiences without running the risk of making the user sick. Right? Well… sort of.
The problem is, motion that isn’t calibrated correctly is just as disorienting as motion that exists with no corollary. If I’m standing still and everything is moving around me, I get sick. If I’m walking on a treadmill and the environment around me moves fast enough I should be running? I get sick. Of course, if your device isn’t connected to the treadmill, there’s no way of knowing how fast you feel like you should be moving, so there’s no way to make those calibrations. That’s why, while proprietary treadmills are starting to come into vogue, there’s nothing out there for the gym enthusiast who’s tired of the view.
There doesn’t seem to be an easy fix. You could figure out how fast an average machine goes on setting “1” and let people select the same setting in your app, and it just might work — but I can find no evidence that “1” on one treadmill will be the same as “1” on a different brand, so in this case, close enough might not be a cigar.
For now, you’ll have to keep listening to podcasts and avoiding eye contact with the other gym bunnies. VR, it seems, will have to wait a little longer for a monthly pass.
