Fitness Games

Amathe

This is an interesting article on fitness gaming, which some of us might benefit from after being cooped up.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/17/health/fitness-video-games-covid-pandemic-wellness/index.html

cameltosis

If I ever achieve my dream and actually manage to make my full-body VR exoskelton, it'll solve the gaming world's fitness problems :P

cameltosis

remsleep said:

cameltosis said:

If I ever achieve my dream and actually manage to make my full-body VR exoskelton, it'll solve the gaming world's fitness problems :P

How would that work exactly?

So, back in 2003 when I was applying to university, I went to an open day at Reading Uni to look at their cybernetics course.

They had a demo-glove we got to try out. It had motors / servos at each joint in the glove. When we tried to grab something in virtual reality, the motors/servos would lock or push back so that we could "feel" the object in the real world.

Using that demo, we got to pick up a pen and write stuff in VR, and it actually felt like we were holding a pen in real life, even though we weren't. We could also catch and throw a frisbee in VR, and it felt like we were holding the frisbee.

So, my exoskelton is that idea, but scaled up for the whole body.

Playing an FPS like CoD, for example, you'd actually have to move your arms, pick up the gun and aim manually. You'd feel the recoil in your whole body through the various servos / motors at each of your joints reacting with each shot. You'd actually have to walk in order to traverse the map, actually have to jump over obstacles etc.

To get over the whole verticality / movement issue, I'd have the whole suit suspended by a connecting arm between the shoulder blades, attached to a cage so the lifting arm could spin around 360. To someone outside the cage, it would look like you were just walking in the air, but within the suit, the locking of the various motors and servos would make it feel like you were actually walking on the ground and your bodyweight would still be placed on your feet.

Now, I don't know how realistic all of this is. I know the technology existed back in 2003 to get all the input and output working properly, so with 17 years of processing power progression, i'm pretty confident that we could build the whole suit and match it up with today's VR goggles to give us a great experience.

However, getting the whole suit suspended off the ground....i just don't know. I'd need to hire a really good engineer to figure that out for me!

Longer term, such a suit would deal well with inputs and outputs of basic movement, but I'd love to match it up with the current developments in haptic feedback. Saw some research being done where someone has created a glove that lets you feel individual raindrops on your hand. Would be awesome to get a full suit that can give you that tactile feedback on top of basic movement of the exoskeleton, but i don't think the tech is there yet.