Exercising at a VR Gym | Hacker News Reader

Exercising at a VR Gym

sfstandard.com

22 pointscreer38 comments

This is the worst use case/execution for VR that I have ever heard of.

VR is actually terrific for exercise, but the whole point is that you don't need to actually leave your house. You don't need to worry about a bunch of equipment or touching the same things as strangers.

I am really looking forward to the Quest 3 coming out in September. Hopefully it is a step up from Quest 2. But with Quest 2, there are a ton of great options for exercise. And I think many of them are much more engaging than a gym workout or a normal jog.

I really like Eleven Table Tennis VR. There is also a baseball training thing called WIN Reality (although you need to order an attachment and have a bat to get the most out of it).

There are a lot more sports/movement VR games. Boxing, tennis, climbing, Beat Saber, golf, football, bowling, kayaking, paintball, basketball (Gym Class). And tons of fitness apps (although those are less fun in my opinion).

I get you but there is something about Location based roomscale that you cant replicate at home. And it's not just large m^2 of tracked space -- in this case it's tangible user interface at scale. Like a wall climbing experience where you are solo freescaling El Capitan from all you can tell. There are the tradeoffs but I like the possibility space it opens up to have highly controlled physical objects interacting with you in an otherwise virtual experience. Besides letting go of a 200lbs deadlift does kind of provide its own haptics ;}

Freescaling El Capitan in VR with a real wall would actually be amazing.

Ideally for me with a foam pit underneath.

Having done both rock climbing and worn a vr headset, I feel like the reality here is you'd bang the headset against the wall constantly.

Integrate it into a helmet for extra realism.

I already bang my helmet into the rock constantly while climbing.

Also, realistically I think you'd need to be on top rope / autobelay for this to be safe, so it would be kind of like following the whole route

edit: but also, just go outside people! I guess VR climbing can be safer than outdoors (less risk of rockfall), and it opens it up to some portion of the 'outdoor climbing experience' in all seasons, and potentially with less commute... but I don't know that I'd prefer it to just going to a climbing gym. It's not like they can capture the smells of outdoors or the breeze carrying distant sounds or the heat of the sun reflecting off the rock and beating down on you.

Indoor gyms can't even get the feel of rock right.

I sort of agree, but could be tempted to join a VR gym with haptic experiences I couldn’t get at home. Eg, a boxing experience that somehow includes a real bag, or rowing, or…whatever. I think there is a lot of room to be creative, if gym equipment can make VR exercise more effective and/or interesting, I would definitely do it.

But like... if you're joining a VR gym with a real bag you're giving up the main advantage of VR for exercise. A normal gym has a bag and a rowing machine? You're leaving your house anyway now. I still don't see it.

It is giving up one advantage for another. If the rowing machine was connected to the VR system, it would be a different experience. Basically, what I want are physical gaming experiences that go beyond shadow boxing or shadow slicing with some vibration feedback. The market for fitness is big enough, we can have both!

I lost 10kg of weight from playing synth riders alone during covid, but I've gotten no where near the figure i had after 3 years in the gym. If i where to choose between going to the gym and VR, there's no chance I'd choose VR, it's just too limited. I'd need to have glasses similar to regular glasses with XR passthrough to get close.

For weight do diet. Gym is for muscle mass and cardiovascular health. Just do a low-carb diet in the vr.

How was "put thing on my sweaty workout face that 30 other people have put on their sweaty workout faces today" not an immediate sign that this was a bad idea right at the start?

It doesn't matter that they supposedly kill the bacteria with UV, it's still gross.

It’s weird, since they don’t really need to do that. Just maintain a separate $20 face guard for every user (the foam that you attach to the quest that then touches your face), that should be in the realm of a normal gym, and this is supposed to be a high end one.

> Rajs remains upbeat about Black Box’s future, saying its novelty guarantees success—there’s simply no one else offering what they do.

Doesn't seem like a winning bet...

I noticed that also. Totally insufficient for success of course. All the more so that they end up with the same high monthly cost as a "high end gym". And half the store network already closed, but that was perhaps due to Covid since they started just before that.

> its novelty guarantees success—there’s simply no one else offering what they do

Yep, this is an insanely naive thing to voice out loud.

I can think of countless ideas that nobody else is doing, not because I'm a super genius entrepreneur, but because they're shitty ideas.

I love these stupid statements. Or love feeling schadenfreude at people who say them. Are they delusional? Or self-aware and doing Baghdad Bob levels of PR/misinformation?

It’s similar to the response when asked how your money losing business will ever succeed is frequently “Amazon lost money for 20 years before turning a profit.”

I think this fits into the Instagram/influencer trend of faking it until you make it. And I think that some people think appearance is reality so just expect to succeed because they want to succeed. Rather than creating a good thing that is useful.

"I pull off my headset and place it in the “Clean Box,” a small black box that’s supposed to kill bacteria with ultraviolet light. But I can’t help but wonder about all the strangers’ sweat on those non-machine-washable goggles."

To me, this pretty much kills the whole thing.

I don't want someone else's sweat on my face. It's like the equivalent to sharing underwear for me...

It's a Vive Pro. I'm not sure why they're not using disposable or machine washable interface covers. I always used them when I had a Vive and I didn't even share it with anyone...

"he believes Black Box solves the fitness problem that’s always been thorniest: getting people to stick to their workouts."

This might be a wildly unpopular opinion, but I personally feel if somebody requires VR/video game to be bolted onto exercise in order to stick with it, they're probably not going to stick with it.

I also can't see how the people that use VR/video games as their primary/sole exercise source don't transfer the supposed monotony of exercise which they are trying to avoid, over to the video game, eventually.

I run and go to the gym almost every day and have gotten it into a habit which reinforces itself (wanting to cover more distance, faster pace, heavier weights). I don't think I could replace running, swimming, the gym with a VR game like table tennis or Beat Saber and get anywhere near the same intensive workout, and I doubt I could play these games daily for more than a month without just getting fed up of the game, as you would with any standard video game.

I get it, I really have never stuck with any exercise-for-its-own-sake activity even in pursuit of a tangible goal. I'm fit but it's all with activities that I enjoy enough to do despite the exercise: cycling, tennis, martial arts, etc. I don't think I'm too unusual in this either.

So if there's a way to turn pure fitness activities into sport/game type activities then that could work for some people, maybe a lot of people. I don't think this will be successful at that, but that idea itself seems reasonable to me.

Frustrating. I’ve put on literally no muscle mass at my VR gym. Frankly even when deadlifting supposedly 1,000 pounds, I felt nothing and immediately fell over backwards.

Personally I love exercising in VR but the main thing I like about it is NOT having to go to a Gym.

For everyone complaining that you don't want to have to go to a gym. I can understand the cleanliness part but do remember you may or may not also own an exercise machine dusting away in the basement like me.

The whole act of going to them gym is part of the motivation, at least for me. If I had everything at home I know I would never use it. However going to the gym after work is routine and it would be stupid to go back home without a workout when I am already there.

Actual Title: Exercising at World’s First VR Gym in San Francisco Didn’t Turn Me Into A Believer

The only pro that I see with black box is that you get resistance training. I can’t think of any other VR offering that has this feature

After that all I see are negatives:

I should try it before I complain, but a big point about VR is being able to do stuff remotely with people. Having to physically go to a gym gives you lots of excuses not to go vs having VR in the living room. The travel time is also a time sink.

As others have pointed out, hygiene is a thing. I’m not keen on wearing a headset that other sweaty people used. It’s one thing to use normal gym equipment, but this goes on my face. Not sure if UV light is enough. That particular headset is gross when it’s damp.

Looking at the headset, it looked like an HTC Vive model which is really old. The Quest 2 has much better visual fidelity. I know this because I’ve owned and used both extensively. A quest 2 is also a very affordable as a standalone VR peloton.

Another big problem that this shares with other gyms is the lack of variety compared to VR workouts at home. It looks like there is only one game. Even if there are variations, it’s still just one game. That will get boring within two months.

> Having to physically go to a gym gives you lots of excuses not to go vs having VR in the living room. The travel time is also a time sink.

It's often argued that the act of physically going to the place is what makes you do it. Personally, I know that I probably get more use out of the static bike at my gym than most people get out of the Peloton collecting dust in their own home.

The path of least resistance also curves around working out within the confines of your own home. If you struggle going for a run or going to the gym, putting on the clothes and forcing yourself out of the door is 99% of the act.

There's a similar parallel with working from home. Sometimes the change of environment and the mood of that environment is what compels people to move between resting/exercising/working mode.

Of course, for the gym in particular, it does also depend on what the journey to the gym is like as well as other factors (weather, traffic etc.)

Maybe it’s different for different people, especially ones in different generations? As in older generations tend to favor face to face, and different activities for different locations. I don’t feel that totally applies for the younger generations because the internet arrived during our formative years.

Personally, the only time gyms were effective for me was when I was forced into the office.

Now, my productivity is greater working remotely, and so is my discipline when it comes to working out at home. Probably because I have more time to do things like sleep, where normally it would get eaten up by a long commute.

The only real pro that I see for going to the gym is to meet new people.

This looks and sounds like hell on earth, exercising is really fool proof we don't need all these gadgets.

A power cage, a bench, bar and some weight is all you need. And given what they charge at that VR gym you could buy a whole set in less than 6 months there. Do some basic 5x5 programm 30 min a day 3 days a week and you'll be in better shape than 80% of the population in no time. If you don't have the motivation for this man-up and stop being a useless slob, life is hard and this is one of the easiest part of it

Tech is trying to solve more and more non-problems. In this case the solution seems even worse than the problem itself

I think there's a certain class of people who find exercise inherently interesting, and others who don't. VR is for the latter.

(I've gone to the gym ~7 years daily, I now do some supplement stuff also in VR, and I've noticed an improvement since adding VR. I think it's because VR workouts impose structure that the rest of my routine lacks. There are ways I could add more structure to my regular routine of course, but I don't want to expend the additional mental energy that way, especially in an ongoing basis.)

I'm definitely one of the latter but it's very common and huge segments of the modern "fitness market" are specifically tailored to different flavors of this. Rock climbing, boxing & BJJ, racket sports etc. There are tons of options for people to get moderate physical activity while doing other things, and have a reasonable level of fitness from it.

But if you want to achieve even serious amateur athlete-level fitness on any dimension there's going to be a solid amount of drudgery to overcome though, and I don't see how VR really addresses that.

I don't particularly enjoy it, but 2 hours a week is a cheap price to pay not to be in better shape than 80%. It's one of the craziest effort/gain ratio out there, the closest thing to a magic pill. It's not a hobby or entertaining, it's maintenance. I don't like doing an oil change but I know that if I skip too much my car will die.

I also don't particularly enjoy working yet I do that 8 hours a day.

I am part of the latter group, and for me, the solution has been BJJ. You just have to find something that is not just running or lifting weights.

I never got into this, but I have a friend who did really like Blackbox VR and says he got really fit using it (although I also have many more friends who weren’t so smitten). I guess don’t knock it ‘til you try it?

The problem with VR Gyms is that they reduce the value that people place on natural, beautiful habitats (when it comes to outdoor sports and exercise). Regular gyms do that a little too but VR Gyms are a next-level that could make going to the gym much more efficient and pleasant.

What this means is that fewer people will care about preserving natural areas. It's a small step towards a future where people care less and less about the natural world.

Another step in technology that seems like a good thing but on the whole is a step towards a completely conquered planet.

I love VR but this seems so stupid to me. It’s funny when people take what seems like a cool idea- digital presence- and just go off the rails (eg, hapifork [0] takes a cool thing-quantified self- and adds absurd cost and user experience) and I think are an overall negative for driving adoption of a new technology.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/hapifork-bluetooth-enabled-smar...

I have an Oculus/Meta Quest, I don't use it much though but I used the app mentioned "Supernatural", which right off the bat sounds better than the app the journalist used (protecting a crystal).

Supernatural at least has a few different types of workouts, locations, instructors, etc.

But even that aside, having a Quest headset means so many other fitness games like Thrill of the Fight.

This just doesn't seem like the right application of VR. Having to go in physically is almost a spit-take for a VR gym. I wish them the best though.

As someone who was briefly a member pre-covid, I saw/see huge potential for the resistance + game system they developed. I got fit and had fun doing so rather than feeling grumpy. With an ever-developing game world, I would pay thousands to have a home system…

But Apple Vision Pro apps + dumbbells might be all I will need before too long.

It’s amusing to read the confident armchair critiques in the comments. Comments stay commenting.

Of course it's in SF cos the people there don't spend enough time on computers already.

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