What if no two workouts were the same, simply because the surroundings looked different in each and every one of them? If this is what motivates you, the VR home gym may be just your thing.
No matter how modern the interior of a gym looks like, it’s still dull if compared to the great outdoors. Another issue is born from that comparison, as not all of us have the time to go outside in order to exercise, not to mention that finding a remote area got more and more complciated nowadays. German design firm HYVE believes that its virtual reality home gym could change the way you work out for ever.
“Lots of people sign up in gyms or sports clubs, but quit after a few weeks. [Their] most common excuses are ‘no time’ and ‘too boring,'” explained Johannes Scholl, HYVE’s senior innovation designer and exercise enthusiast, in an interview with The Creators Project.
“On the other hand, there are lots of people who love gaming on consoles, smartphones and PCs that have a guilty conscience when they realize they have spent their entire weekend on their sofas.”
“The huge advantage of our system is that the information of your visual sense, coming from the VR headset, is in line with the other senses,” added Scholl.
HYVE collaborated with animation studio Lumacode to create realistic environments for people to work out in. The virtual reality generated by the Icaros VR system is so believable that people’s brains are actually tricked into believing that they are not just sitting in a room.
“When you are doing a steep descent in VR you are also doing it in reality, blood rushes into your head and you are sucked into the virtual environment. This enables people to stay in virtual worlds longer, without getting ‘simulator sick.'”
Icaros will be the subject of a crowdfunding campaign this summer, according to its developers. Assuming that this contraption will indeed be commercially available, some of us will actually have the chance of exercising on different planets, or at the bottom of the ocean, if that’s what they prefer. Luckily for them, the crushing pressure or the lack of an atmosphere won’t be part of the scenario.
Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the way Virtuix Omni turns running on virtual fields into fitness, or the FeelReal VR mask and Nirvana VR helmet that bring olfactory and tactile stimuli to virtual reality.
