Have some courage.
As we prepare once again for the annual relentless onslaught of TV commercials hawking virtual reality gaming headsets, it is high time for you to once again wonder whether these things are good for anything other than a mildly amusing, very expensive party trick. Good news: This holiday season, in lieu of using a headset to dodge invisible enemies bent on your destruction while careening around your real-life living room and running repeatedly into real-life hardwood furniture, you can use these goggles to make a dent in the unconscionable volume of Christmas cookies you ingested at the company holiday party. You have to play video games now, you see. For fitness.
An outfit called VirZOOM—a caps lock-friendly portmanteau with origins that will become apparent shortly—manufactures a family of gadgets designed to integrate virtual reality gaming into one’s use of an exercise bike. The premise is simple: As your pedaling goes, so does your character in whichever of their games you elect to play.
VirZOOM’s proprietary bike, which builds gaming controls directly into the handlebars, has been on the market for over a year, but at $399, it’s a hell of an investment for a hyperspecialized piece of equipment that also requires the purchase of a VR headset and smartphone (or computer), and that requires you to keep an exercise bike in your house.
This fall, though, the company is rolling out the $99 VZ Sensor, a matchbox-size plastic square that straps to any exercise bike—whatever your gym has will work just fine—and transforms it into a whimsical exercise machine-gaming system hybrid. After launching the associated app and pulling the headset on as normal, the Sensor automatically… well, senses your VR system with a bit of gentle pedaling. From there, you enter the VirZoom arcade, where you select a game (or a rotation between several games) to play during your workout.
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Source: GQ