The Exercise Video Game The great advantage of sports over exercise machines is that you are too busy and excited trying to hit the ball, or throw your opponent over your shoulder, or parry a lunge, to notice that your muscles are complaining. A second advantage is that sports are less boring--although that can in part be dealt with by using your stepper or exercise cycle while reading a book or purusing the net.
The solution is to cross the exercise machine with the video game. Build something along the general lines of a fancy nautilus machine, where the moving parts provide the inputs to a video game. Think of it as a set of giant joysticks.
Imagine, for example, that the video game puts you in the role of an anti-aircraft gunner in the navy in WWII. Pushing your legs raises and lowers the point of aim of the gun, pulling with your hands swivels the gun right or left. The motions are the motions of an exercise machine--but while you are making them, you are too busy and excited trying to nail that Zero to notice how tired your muscles are getting.
The Mark II version of the game takes advantage of feedback to tune your exercise session to your precise needs. The computer judges how tired each group of muscles is by how hard you are pulling, how fast you are reacting. The objective is to get every muscle to the same point of exhaustion. If the computer concludes that your left arm has almost reached that point, it starts sending in almost all of the attacking planes on the right, forcing you to do most of the work with your right arm.
There exist rowing machines with a video screen simulating a race, and exercise cycles with a screen providing scenary. So far as I know, there is no exercise machine that is combined with a video game good enough so that anyone would play it for fun. But there should be.
[Since I wrote the above several correspondents have pointed out to me the existence of dancing games, originally from Japan, in which the player must move his feet from one area to another on instructions from the game.]
daviddfriedman.com |
