Playing tennis on your Wii is so five seasons ago! It’s not a satisfying workout to simply swing your arm forward and backward dressed in pyjamas in your living room, knowing full well you’ll be back on the couch diving into some biryani .
Enter Virtual Reality to take your gaming and your workout to a whole new level.
Pioneering the space
One of the biggest players in this fitness subculture is Black Box VR, the first VR gym. Located in San Francisco, they won ‘best startup’ at 2018’s Consumer Electronics Show.
“The programmes that are implemented in the Black Box VR game were created by top trainers and exercise scientists. Based on over 100 exercise studies, your body will see immediate improvements that match or beat traditional exercise programmes. You will push harder and work out more consistently, even if it feels like a fun sport!” says the Black Box VR website.
So how does it work? Forget standing in an airy, brightly-lit gym with other people sweating it out — at Black Box VR, much like the name, you stand in a dark space. But you’re not just wearing the headgear you’d wear for a video game. While in a totally private room, your body is strapped with ergonomic sensors and controllers, so your focus is on the task at hand, working out using the equipment around you.
So what’s the actual experience like? Virtually placed in visceral environments, fight your way through a tsunami and exercise those glutes, calves and hamstrings, brave tough blizzards with dead-lift equipment working your pectorals, back and biceps, conquer the earth and fiery environments using your chest and shoulder muscles... you can embody Bear Grylls without going anywhere near a mound of dirt!
Black Box VR claims Virtual Reality fitness can be tailored to any scale of fitness level, whether you’re just taking up that New Year’s resolution or you have the stamina of a gladiator.
- We can look to a June 2017 study by University of Kent’s School of Engineering and Digital Arts research team led by Maria Matsangidou in which isometric bicep curl sets were done at 20% of the maximum weight test subjects could lift, which they were then asked to hold for as they could.
- In the same room, a VR-equipped group who saw the same environment, including a visual representation of an arm and the weight, and carried out the same lift and hold as the non-VR group.
- The study showed a clear reduction in perception of pain and effort when using VR tech, explaining, “Altered visual feedback may increase or decrease the pain perception based on the visual proprioceptive feedback.”
The Artificial Intelligence in the system learns your workout pattern and, with real-time resistance, ups the ante for you by adjusting the machines and the simulations accordingly. Plus, the AI, easy to use by even the tech-illiterate, will inform you if your form needs to shift.
For the Indian market
Google ‘Virtual Reality fitness India,’ and you sadly won’t get satisfying results. Some gyms state they are a VR fitness zone, but actually just have a widescreen television set up opposite a treadmill. (Be sure to look out for these spaces by calling ahead and finding out if they have the genuine equipment.) Virtual Reality workouts haven’t really made a home in India, but some have plenty of hope.
Abhinav Shankar, a software engineer, shares, “I am at my desk for about 10 hours a day, so the gym is important to my mental and physical well-being. I work out everyday — Sunday included. I have dabbled in VR gaming and have also heard of VR fitness. While I don’t know what the requirements are in India for a Virtual Reality gym (because I am sure there may be a regulations worry), it sounds like an exciting venture. But I don’t know how ready the market is for it.”
It’s worth noting that a space needs to be VR-ready, totally separate from a mainstream gym; no sound or light interferences which may interrupt the flow of a session. There’s also the massive amounts of data required to run an AI programme with VR.
Ultimately, Virtual Reality, tapping into some already fitness-fanatic societies in the country, still requires some patience. Some point out that bottom-line gym etiquette needs to evolve progressively for this technology to even be considered, from people not wiping the gym equipment after a workout in a shared gym to hogging the equipment. So imagine sharing a VR ensemble with someone else’s sweat on it.
Not without its drawbacks
But we have to be fairly sceptical of Virtual Reality and fitness. While VR itself seems to be an effective tool in pain management, it’s worth noting the considerable amount of time required to maintain and clean the equipment — something which needs expert technicians. So how do trainers feel about this potential entrant to the fitness market?
Even in the UK, where the age of boutique gyms is reaching peak saturation, VR fitness is yet to make itself known, according to Tamsa Madzimbamuto-Ray, health and well-being physiologist at Nuffield Health in London. “There are so many factors to consider; the health and safety implications being the most important ones, plus the regulation and moderation of the VR usage by gyms.”
Fitness trainer Bilon Aristotle, based in Hyderabad, explains why the market may not be ready for it. “We live in a place where we can easily go engage in adventure sports and the satisfaction of such a workout is more real. As a trainer, I love to go to the gym, smell the iron, work up a sweat and see the workouts around me. See, it’s like in The Matrix in which Cypher eats a steak. He knows full well it’s not real. We’ll always go back to the classics.” Plus, we’ve got to admit, there’s nothing quite like having a real-life trainer know your history of strengths, weaknesses and limitations; your workout journey is essentially amplified by the interpersonal experience you’d miss out having an AI-driven session.
Our next worry as potential consumers: is it actually addictive? After all, the immersive nature of the equipment for VR workouts needs to be standardised by local industries and there don’t seem to be any bodies in India dedicated to such psychological analyses just yet. In the meantime, be happy with a gaming session with your Oculus or a hike in the — ew — real hills.
