Gyms are terrible. That’s the whole title of this article but it bears repeating. For me, working out in general is terrible. The endorphins from finishing a workout rarely suffice to rip me out of bed the next morning and repeat the process. A nice, long, outdoor walk is my style. It just feels so weird to torture yourself for a set amount of time for no other purpose than maybe stave off death or succumb to vanity.
You know what else is terrible though? The foods I eat, and I love them, so much. So, something has got to give. I would, in fact, like to stave off death.
For a while I thought about joining a sports league here in Austin. Soccer maybe. Yet you spend an hour just driving back and forth, and casual research pegged it as a significant commitment.
That’s when I thought about VR. I’ve followed the industry for a while. Video games are delightful. And if I could play games and get fit with all the conveniences of a console, I’m in.
I’ll try it out for a month. Twenty-eight days to see if I can come close to losing 10 pounds. And onward to 40 or 50 pounds if it’s sustainable over the next five months. I’m at about 200 pounds now, and somewhere around 150-160 is where I would like to be. I’m also stacking the deck in my favor with healthy eating. I’m half-heartedly done Weight Watchers for a while now, and I see results when I commit. Time to get in gear. One of those low gears because we’re just starting out. Then we’ll get into fifth gear, or however many gears fitness has.
I’ll play the big names in the space, along with any cool indie titles I find, mostly with an eye toward fitness. I’ve got plenty more tech adventures to go on, but this month on this blog is all about VR. I’ll release a new article about every week or so covering the week before.
Day 0, unboxing the thing
I got the Oculus Quest 2 at a GameStop of all places. I saw that it was available from a local search, and figured, hey, better than having it shipped, I support my, erm, local, umm, GameStop? I was also kind of curious to just head in there and see if it had turned into some kind of magical retail experience from all the hype back when GameStop stock caught fire as a meme.
No, it was still as you remember it. A little game store in a strip mall selling consoles and geek figurines, right across the street from the stalwart Walmart that fights as an underdog against Amazon. Man, times are weird.
I got my Quest, gawked around at the store a bit, and headed back home. Chores and such stopped me from playing just yet. So surprise! That was day -1, a Saturday.
Day 0 was Sunday, Oct. 17. (I’ll start my 4 week countdown on Monday, Oct. 18). I unboxed the thing. Came with the headset, two controllers that have well placed buttons to be your virtual hands, a silicone cover for the foam, and a separator for those with eye glasses.
Then I got through some tutorials. Because I am Mr. Follows-Tech-Closely-And-I-Have-Worn-VR-Headsets-Before, I didn’t think I would go slack jawed. I’m glad to say, I did. Just staring around the beautiful menu room, feeling like I was at some luxury desert escape. Already, this was great. It was beautiful. I didn’t notice any “screen door” effect like I had when I first tried on a headset at a SXSW event years ago, back when they were used as a gimmick to advertise Game of Thrones. (One of these things, VR and Game of Thrones, aged better than the other). Then the kiddo woke from his nap before I was 15 minutes into what must be the most successful VR game thus far: Beat Saber.
Basically you take two light sabers but don’t call them light sabers because we don’t have the Star Wars rights. Then you have red and blue cubes fly at you from a long futuristic Tronish highway and you slash them in the right direction to the rhythm of house music. It was delightful. I got out of breath! I’m so out of shape! And that is the point after all.
Jump to the middle of this video to get an idea of what playing it feels like (and see what I look like playing it at the bottom of this post, lol).
Later I watched what a free promo video of dinosaurs up close in Jurassic World. You gotta go dino at some point in VR. Dino and space. Two pillars. Anyway, it was pretty bad. These were 3D movies I was watching, and the detail in the distance was fuzzy. In fact most details like fine text or edges were a bit fuzzy, and if I dwelled on them too much, I got a bit headachy. So I was glad to leave behind that demo and get back to the games, which didn’t seem to suffer from this. (I’ll also keep playing with the straps and settings. Seems a common problem online).
It goes to show that VR, while already fun and useful for education and engineering and training and all that, has a long way to the maturity of current smartphones. For folks who remember, I would say that the Quest 2 is at about the level of the iPhone 3GS. A competent, nice-to-use device, but with miles of improvement ahead. Just getting to dense enough resolution to really take in the scene will make things exponentially more enjoyable.
The setup in my living room is simple enough. I have maybe a 4 foot by 8 foot space to play in. You mark it off by using a pass through camera that can see the actual world in black and white and present it to you, just enough to mark things off. Get to close to the edges, and walls of blue markers show where your boundary is, and if you go beyond the boundary, you get to see your actual reality in black and white again.
I haven’t felt any nausea. Although I’ve mostly stuck to games where you stand in your area without wandering around, and where you are the only one doing the moving. When the game moves you (like in a fighter cockpit or a rollercoaster), that’s when you especially get the confusion between your mind and eyes. Your inner ear thinks, I should be feeling movement, but your eyes are all over the place, and that, for me is where nausea can kick in.
Sunday night when the kiddo was fast asleep, I finished my “workout” playing another 45 minutes to work up a good sweat, thanks mostly to Beat Saber. And you know what? I looked like an absolute idiot doing it. At least given my wife’s laughter and telling me that I look like an absolute idiot. She is 100% correct. Even if you had contact lenses for VR glasses in the future, you’re still wildly flailing at nothing. It is important to have zero shame in VR. And zero shame have I. (That’s me down there).