Gaming: I Tried To Exercise In Vr For An Entire Month, And I Think I've...

I want to use VR to not only health kick, but health punch, and maybe even health run.

This week I've been: Strapping the VR headset on every day and (regrettably) playing Rocket League again.

On the first day of January, I was both cold and had a cold: a terrible start to my new year's resolution of, well, actually getting enough exercise. Luckily, the Meta Quest 3 I'd been neglecting for the last six months offered a welcoming solution to my problems. I could exercise in the warmth, without having to be sick and generally unpleasant around sweaty strangers.

My rubric is simple. I didn't want to overcomplicate the act of just doing some exercise, so I set myself an exercise goal via my smart watch, without signalling to my watch when I was exercising. Instead, I would just let it tally up exercise based on physical exertion. So, if I slacked, I wouldn't finish.

To establish some ground rules, I decided this would not be a replacement for traditional exercise, and traditional exercise would not be a replacement for it. I would try to do a minimum of 25 minutes of VR workouts every day, regardless of any other kind of movement I had achieved. Luckily, I have a bit of a bad habit of leaving my watch on charge during the day, so oftentimes, I could just intentionally forget it and have a fresh exercise ring to finish.

The exercise ring is how my Apple Watch tracks movement. There's a standing ring (which measures the amount you stand), a movement ring (which measures general movement) and an exercise ring (I think you can guess what that is).

Secondly, whatever way I filled that exercise ring was always fair game. After a while, I realised it was easier to tackle boredom and more efficient to finish my exercise quicker by just kind of dancing while I played Beat Saber. I don't think either you nor I particularly want footage of that here, but imagine it as sort of like an overweight fighting game character stance, and you're 70% there.

On the first day, I reached my 25-minute line, crossed it, and called it a day. I had initially forgotten to put my watch on, and my controller batteries were dead. Great start. These are the kinds of setbacks that might send you straight back home if you were trekking out to a gym. But Beat Saber is just so instantly engaging that I didn't mind.

A quick game of $100 bills on Expert+ woke me right up, and only partly because I'm just barely good enough to finish it. I felt somewhat tired by the end of my exercise, but m

Source: PC Gamer