Despite the alarming rise in obesity worldwide, there have never been so few excuses to avoid exercise. Wearables like the Apple Watch and Fitbit can monitor our movements and biometrics to personalize fitness goals and increase motivation. The mode goes a step further, stimulating the wearer’s vestibular nerve, tricking the mind into thinking the body is more physically active than it is, and there are thousands of hours of YouTube workouts to keep us moving around the bedroom (get ready for next month’s celebrity workout DVD commercials!)
Some high-end gyms invest heavily in experiences that break the boredom of repetitive exercise and improve results in less time. Virgin Active’s altitude chamber spin class, for example, aims to make the bike classes even more challenging by sucking oxygen out of the air.
Over 400 gyms worldwide now offer Icaros – a virtual reality exercise machine that delivers core workout by making users appear to be flying and diving deep in the ocean, and Holodia is using traditional exercise machines like rowing machines and enhancing the experience with virtual reality to make the user feel like they are traveling through fantasy worlds.
Black Box VR is concerned with “creating the world’s first virtual reality gym experience” that will gamble the workout away and make it a futuristic sport rather than a video game. It’s set to use machine learning modules to personalize your programs, as well as a pulley system to provide real muscle and strength building resistance to your entire body.
Selected fitness studios around the world offer The Trip by Le Mills, a leading global fitness market leader. This fully immersive training experience combines bike training with a journey through digitally created worlds that can be seen on a curved cinema screen.
Les Mills started my personal journey to fitness. When I woke up overnight on New Year’s Day 2017, I thought I’d punish myself further by jumping on the scales. Seeing 205 lbs (14.7 stones) stare back was almost enough to warrant an early “dog hair”, but the reflection in the mirror told me to head in a healthier direction.
As someone who even hated the concept of a gym, I reluctantly signed up with my local. It was there that I discovered Les Mills Body Pump (choreographed exercise-to-music group fitness classes) and Body Combat (martial arts-inspired cardio). The carefully arranged music soon fascinated me; an essential part of all Les Mills workouts; the intelligently designed structure of the courses that achieve just the right level of fatigue for different parts of the body; and the fact that every workout is updated every three months with new moves and a new music playlist to keep it fresh.
Jump on a year later and I now weigh 158 pounds (11.3 kilos in my money) and exercise and fitness are no longer a “concept” for me – it’s an activity that I enjoy and focus on am happy. As you can imagine, as someone who has been into virtual reality for a long time, I was intrigued by how my two interests could combine, and I’m certainly not alone.
In fact, there is an entire institute devoted to virtual reality fitness – the Virtual Reality Institute of Health and Exercise, which was founded to better understand the caloric effects of VR experiences on the human body.
They independently evaluate VR games in a controlled environment with the aim of posting the results through a fitness rating system, as many VR apps are more effective than a treadmill at burning calories. In fact, at the time of writing, the institute found that since its release in 2016, 152 million calories have been burned from playing the rhythm VR title Audioshield (the equivalent of 46 walks around the world).
A guy named Tim Donahey AKA u / leppermessiah1 developed his own VR fitness program. For 50 days he played 4 Vive games over an hour (9 min: Audioshield, 20 min: Thrill of the Fight, 20 min: Holopoint, 10 min: Holoball per day). The result was a weight loss of 14.4 lbs.
I’m currently curating content for the Future Tech Now and Virtual Reality 2018 shows, and that includes putting together a virtual reality gym. Throughout my research, it has been incredibly exciting to discover the startups that are exploring the use of immersive technologies to make training more intense, engaging, competitive, and most importantly, less boring!
Despite my preference for Les Mills classes, sometimes it’s not always convenient to hit the gym. If I’ve factored in the 40-minute walk each way, a training session can last a total of 2.5 hours. Combine that with the recent ‘mayhem’ from the UK’s ‘snow bomb’, strolling on a Sunday morning in bitter cold temperatures can test (and sometimes even beat) my willpower. If there was one free experience I could do at home that could recreate some of the features of a Les Mills class – the music, the updates, and the smartly designed workouts, I would be a happy gym bunny.
I’ve seen games like the Audioshield and Holodance mentioned above that by default require you to move vigorously to block the beats, but the calories burned by such games are more of a welcome episode than the core objective, so I jumped at the chance to try BOX VR from boutique VR development studio FitXR recently.
As you can probably imagine, this is a rhythm-based VR boxing game. Available for Oculus, Vive and, more recently, Windows MR, the title was developed in collaboration with real boxing instructors and offers a range of workouts defined by time, intensity and calorie consumption. Before trying the game, I asked the two FitXR co-founders – Sam Cole and Sameer Baroova – what makes this game different from rhythm games.
“In the beginning we were really interested in this technology and saw what happened to Les Mills and immersive fitness. As we dug deeper, we learned very quickly that music underpins many of these fitness classes. Our teachers have a lot of experience in dance and teach boxing as if they were teaching dance. They understand the importance of music and that approach was really enlightening how we designed BOX VR, ”said Cole.
I am personally very interested in how scientific research can quantify the fitness of virtual reality. The nature of virtual reality on a spatial scale means that tracking can not only be used for game mechanics, but can also register the user’s movements over time and provide feedback to adjust goals and gameplay in real time. I asked Cole if they planned to do any scientific research on BOX VR’s ability to produce the same results as a gym workout:
“Science is what interests us extremely. At the VR Health Institute they did an article on the Discovery Channel. During a BOX VR session, the moderator’s heart rate was monitored and his exertion measured. The results showed that the maximum effort was just as high as in a sprint. “
I was super impressed with BOX VR. I was a bit skeptical at first because I thought the weight of the headset and the connection to a computer would limit me, but I didn’t even notice when I was playing. During the 3-minute sequence, I was visually guided to left hook, right hook, straight hit and uppercut, and duck and stance changes. It was seriously intense. Every 30 seconds there was a short pause bite according to the protocol of HiiT (High Intensity Interval Training), which has been scientifically proven to achieve faster results. After removing the Vive, I felt the same high as after taking a body combat class. In fact, with a resting heart rate of 71 BPM, I measured 156 BPM after just 3 minutes. I was also impressed that it doesn’t take up a lot of floor space. One problem with watching exercise videos at home is the amount of space that certain workouts take up. BOX VR was obviously designed for people with small spaces.
You can see that this is just the beginning of what BOX VR can do – once you add more environments, leaderboards, multiplayer, and extensive personalized data, this could become a real compliment (or even an alternative) to the gym. Personally, I would never give up the gym; I like the relationship between the lecturers and the atmosphere of being in a group of people who are all synced to the same movement – I don’t think virtual reality could (or should) replace that. But for the time poor or who want to speed up their results on the days when the gym is out of the question, BOX VR could be a great way to speed up weight loss after the vacation!
BOX VR is available for download from the Steam Store.
This is a guest post by Jonathan Tustain that was not created by the UploadVR staff other than minor formatting and editing. No remuneration was exchanged for the creation of this content.
Jonathan Tustain has been working with virtual reality since 2012. He leads the London Virtual Reality Developer Meetup and recently completed The Complete Guide to Virtual Reality, which will be published in 2018. He is particularly interested in how immersive technologies can go beyond entertainment and improve productivity, education and training.
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