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Ah yes, virtual reality.
Bring it up during any regular water-cooler chat, and you may receive a wide variety of responses from your peers.
Now, letâs assume that virtual reality interests you, otherwise youâd be somewhere that isnât here.
And if youâre on the fence about jumping into the VR pool, you might be having a few recurring thoughts: what makes interacting with each otherâs digital avatars in virtual reality cooler than interacting with each otherâs digital avatars the old way? And which virtual reality platform is the best? And what software should I buy? And what kind of experiences can I expect? Are there really no ârealâ games? And do I need a large playspace, or will my cupboard suffice?!
Stop and breathe deeply for a moment. One, two, three, four. Exhale.
Better now? Lovely!
Fortunately for both of us, this article answers none of those dubiously worded questions.
Instead, allow me to articulate upon a prime benefit of VR that is super awesome and totally unlikely to cross the mind of anybody who has yet to submit to our c̶u̶l̶t̶ glorious way of living.
VR slams your favorite HIIT class, any day of the week.
I will sing this point to the high heavens every single chance that IÂ get.
A 2 hour back-to-back session of Eleven: Table Tennis, Sparc, and Thrill of the Fight in ascending order
âBut Gabriel, with a gym membership I can go weight training while I awkwardly solicit the friendship of other gym-dwellers, and then I can sneak a dip into the hot tub before showering without anybody calling me out!â
Yes, you absolutely can. And Iâd never knock anybody for keeping that lifestyle alive. But why would I pay $10 to $20 or more for a single interval-training session when doing virtually anything in VR is 100% aerobics, 100% of the time?
Seriously though. Even with the recent attention that VR has received from the media, it doesnât immediately click with most people (who havenât played with the platform) that gaming in VR is quite literally the opposite of gaming on a flatscreen.
VR has you walking around your room, bending over to pick virtual objects up off your floor, using repetitive arm motions to interact with the environment, bending your hips to throw harder punches, ducking to dodge bullets, dipping or crawling on your floor to crouch.
In simple VR apps where physically intense movement isnât even prioritized, you are STILL burning calories. Just for wandering around your playspace.
The result of 2 hours spent playing zero-gravity frisbee in Echo Arena
The difference is this: using VR equates to hours spent standing up and using your body to navigate a living environment, vs. hours spent sitting down and playing around with your âjoystickâ.
Not to mention that it is significantly easier to binge on fatty junk food while cozying up with your auto-massaging swivel chair and your custom Transformers blanket set.
Notably, it is also much harder to cozy up with anything when youâre lost in what could totally pass for Wes Cravenâs vacation home, a place where you would naturally need both hands free of Cheeto dust.
Yknow, in-case you get spooked or something.
But that isnât even the point that Iâm trying to make!
Take a long, hard look at apps such as Thrill of the Fight, or Holopoint, or Audioshield, or Sparc, and tell me that, given the primitive nature of commercial-grade VR in todayâs market, we donât already have a means of disrupting the standard gym model.
These are all âgamesâ that have you, the player, twisting and shredding your arms and core in order to score points or compete against other players. Sparc could be an actual sport if its lobbies were coded to contain more than 3 other humans at one time. Thrill of the Fight is boxing, but you donât ever lose teeth or sustain irreversible brain damage (unless youâre younger than age 13).
On average, I burn between 650 to 725 calories within roughly an hour spent playing Thrill of the Fight
I get it- not all gym experiences are born equally. Some charge more, some charge less. Some charge more for crappy services and some charge less for the best goddang fitness training youâll find in your life.
In my opinion, the best gym is the one that fits into your lifestyle. Period. So why would I choose VR over a membership? Simply put: Iâm choosing to boost the marginal utility of my PC.
I keep my GPU up-to-date because Iâm already a PC gamer. And by âgamer,â I mean geek. Which means that Iâm speaking with the authority of a geek, to my fellow beloved geeks. I understand you!
With the additional price of $350-$600 for a good HMD, plus the one-time cost of whichever app or game that youâd like to exercise with, youâre set for a full-body workout routine that youâre free to complete from the comfort of your bedroom, for as long as you want, whenever you want.
If you add in a set of adjustable Bowflex dumbbells ($250-ish on sale) and then you also take advantage of your running shoes and actually go running with them, youâll be covered for multiple years. Unless, of course, your fitness goals call for a bench set. Or your PC blows up. In which case, youâre on your own.
But what about athletes?
In its current form, VR is taking the time that lazy people, like me, would normally spend being sedentary, and itâs offering a wonderful incentive to be⊠well, not sedentary. More than that, itâs offering a legitimate method of building fitness in exchange for hours spent gaming.
Granted, I think that there is a ton of potential here for the technology to be picked up by pro-athletes, and we may eventually see v-sports become a part of the sports entertainment industry. Without more than a pair of optical lenses and two âhands,â we can currently simulate table tennis perfectly.
We may not currently see proliferation of peripherals such as VR treadmills or haptic suits that simulate resistance, but the technology is out there. Before things really heat up for VR, however, there needs to be a greater adoption of the existing tech and a hefty boost in market volume, so that prices on HMDs can feasibly go down and VR-friendly base systems can become more available/accessible/affordable.
Who knows, maybe televised v-sports will become a multi-billion dollar industry by 2030. Maybe not. Either way, once VR hits a smartphone-like boom, expect to see the platform develop its athletic capabilities by leaps and bounds.
Why VR Will Blend Gaming & Athletics (Eventually) was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of Bitcoin Insider. Every investment and trading move involves risk - this is especially true for cryptocurrencies given their volatility. We strongly advise our readers to conduct their own research when making a decision.