Gadgetory

so I feel like I'm just in this giant stadium where all these people are standing around watching me do chest presses this is wildly unnerving would you be more or less inclined to exercise if you were wearing this on your face we're about to find out this is black box VR it's a Boise based company that has designed a VR workout experience the idea being that if you normally get bored or you just feel unmotivated at the gym that transporting yourself into a hyper competitive virtual world will make you feel not that way all right we're ready all right ready yes black box okay so what I'm gonna do is you're gonna this is the suiting up here so this is your left hand so go ahead and put that out these are hands-free controllers that you strapped to your wrist so the app can track your movements you strap those on you put on an HTC vive headset which is tethered to the cable machine and you enter a virtual stadium that's where your opponent stands waiting and you're basically supposed to do more chest presses than they do okay now you just can see start doing reps so did you guys also make this gym equipment yeah so this is actually a patent-pending dynamic resistance machine it's specifically built to work with VR so the idea there is that there's a dynamic resistance that can adapt to in-game elements oh yeah so this is just a bite-sized piece of actual gameplay in the full version you'll actually be able to select which movements you want to do and the machine will immediately calibre it's really so machine is adjusting because it knows my reps yep it's counting your reps so your I think probably on 10 or 12 right now there you go good job so if I and I'm trying to defeat this person in front of me on the screen oh good job oh yeah that's the opponent is that the opponent okay can I do as a friend no it's okay it's haha give it your all yeah so eventually you'll actually be able to do this asynchronously with a friend and you could actually battle them right now this is just the computer an AI this basically is measuring your strength and adapting to it are you planning on selling this directly to people like me or are you gonna sell this to gems so phase one is we're actually looking at later this year opening up a our own boutique gym and so we'll actually have these boxes inside our own gym we can come in there'll be a hero trainer that'll walk you through and make sure everything's safe and then go through a calibration phase where everything is perfectly dialed in for your height for your goals for your strength for everything so so you'll be going to a gym that's entirely VXR exactly and three stations VR exactly so this pod right here so we're in about a 10 by 10 space so you imagine going into a gym and you actually have you know 10 to 20 of these where you actually go into your own black box and you have your private space just like this it would be literally exactly like this seems like someone could probably have the wrong form you know doing a lunge or a squat or something like that depending where their knees are if that's not measured precisely they could potentially hurt themselves exactly that's one of the biggest problems and the good thing is with these space stations that they can track it's such a fine fine fidelity that as those sensors get better we can actually track exact biomechanics and again course-correct to make sure that people are dreams that was a pretty wild experience I don't think I've ever worked out in VR before and I think the novelty of it threw me a little bit at first like I wasn't really paying attention to the game aspect of it but that's supposed to be a big part of this whole black box experience the company says that they plan to launch a series of boutique gyms think like equinoxes Barry's bootcamp SoulCycle sometime in mid 2018 they think they're gonna start on the west coast it sounds like it's kind of gonna be expensive just to go work out with a VR headset on but hey we live in the future I guess the future suspense - so is this the next level of working out I just had to say next level tune in next season TBD