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Comment by pazimzadeh | Hacker News Reader

This seems like one of the things that VR/AR might fix. Speaking as someone who tried VR for the first time at the mall yesterday (HTC Vive).

Reminds me of Bret Victor's Seeing Spaces http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/.

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Agreed, reading the reviews for popular VR games like Fruit Ninja [1] and Holopoint [2], lots of people are reporting getting a pretty substantial workout from just playing the game. The hypothetical future of gamers being some of the fittest members of society, instead of least active, might not be so implausible.

You can also imagine gyms might replace some of their cardio equipment with VR setups, should VR prove to be comparable to existing equipment in workout effectiveness. Even if it wasn't as effective, people might prefer it due to the reduced boredom factor.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/486780/

[2] http://store.steampowered.com/app/457960/

I hate to be too cynical but I recall people saying similar things about the Wii when it first came out. While Wii can give you a work out, I don't think it ever really caught on.

Th difference that I see between the two is that the Wii offers an extremely limited number of physical activity variations, whereas VR is effectively open-ended, especially when room-scale setups are considered. Paired with adaptive gameplay and on-body monitors, its orders of magnitudes more useful.

Time will tell, but I don't see this as being the same type of misguided hype.

I used to get a really good workout playing the Kinect Sports games on my Xbox. I'd play the boxing game for a couple hours at a time some days, until my arms were extremely sore (I did it for exercise). Eventually I started carrying light weights for the boxing game.

I'm not sure it's that these things never "caught on". I just think they were marketed poorly as serious games, and so only non-serious gamers bothered with them. Then, like with all games, we got bored and moved on, and the market never innovated further (though there was a Kinect Sports 2).

Me too. It's a real pity the thing never caught on.

(My personal theory on that one is that the input lag really hurt the platform. Plus, when looking for Kinect developers, you're looking for people who are good game developers AND physically active - testing on physical games is hard work! That narrows the pool.)

However, it's interesting to note that what's pretty much universally regarded as the best Kinect game ever came out this year: http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12173190/fru-game-review-x...

Anecdote, not data, but Pokemon Go caused me to lose weight. It just doesn't seem to be something I'm going to keep doing as much this year.

It didn't take too long for people to work out that smaller, finer motions were what worked best for the Wii. One to one tracking in VR means that there's no faking motion and while I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a workout I do have to actually be moving, ducking, and dodging around the room in plenty of VR games.

Yes, speaking as a VR developer, that's absolutely huge.

Good luck trying to fake out the monsters in my game, Left-Hand Path, with tiny wrist motions - it's move or get dismembered time :)

I just looked up your game and it looks awesome. I'll definitely be picking it up once the rift update comes along.

My experience with trying to really play wii sports was that doing so made the game much harder than smaller waggle-motions (which may as well have been button presses) and quickly led to RSI (mostly elbow). And that's with kind of knowing how to play the various sports IRL, and knowing the right ways to move—I'd guess it's even worse otherwise.

And they said the same thing about Pokemon Go.

Is VR going to help at work though?

No, it seems to bulky and thus its hard to use for long periods of time. Just ask VR devs. I do believe that AR have more potential, especially magic leap.

VR dev here. 8 hours with a headset on is way too long, but an hour or two is very doable.

(HTC Vive, properly adjusted. Adjustment is key to comfortable wear on the Vive - it's the difference between 15 minutes before discomfort and 2 hours. )

That's the point I'm aiming at, if you have to do real work in VR, then two hours is not enough.

But with headsets small and light enough, it will enable a completely new market. Magic leap said recently that they are now working with production level designs and that it will be smaller than what is currently on market, let's hope that's the case :-)

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