Virtual Reality is emerging as a powerful tool in the fight against the sedative lifestyle, and adult & childhood obesity. An estimated 15% of virtual reality games burn enough calories during typical play to qualify as medium to intense exercise.
In metabolic testing at the VR Institute of Health and Exercise and SFSU’s Kinesiology labs, the most intense games like Thrill of the Fight, Knockout League, Beat Saber, and others are capable of burning more calories/minute than most dedicated workout equipment at the gym.
But they’re way more fun and far less painful.
This app is built on hundreds of hours of VR-specific metabolic testing using research-grade equipment, making it the only official calorie tracker designed to be accurate for the muscle activation of VR.
Features:
- Accurately track your heart rate and calories in VR (heart rate monitor required)
- Personalize your calorie predictions per game
- Discover and compare new healthy VR games
- Free to use, transparent methodology
- The official app of the VR Health Ratings org.
Accurately Track Heart Rate and Calories in VR:
The VR Exercise Tracker uses hundreds of hours of metabolic VR data to calculate your calorie cost in each game we rate. General exercise trackers struggle to predict accurate calorie burn from heart rate because there’s no public data on the muscle activation of typical VR titles. We have that data.
See Personalized Calorie Predictions:
Even before you start playing a game, the VR Exercise Tracker uses each game’s VR Health rating to calculate expected calorie burn for you, based on your age, weight, and gender.
Discover New Healthy VR Games:
There are new games coming out all the time that are good exercise, making VR a refreshable piece of exercise equipment. Finding those games is now much easier. Easily see an ordered list of all games rated by the VRHI, from highest expected calorie burn to the lowest.
Free and Transparent:
The VR Health Institute is an objective, third-party ratings organization dedicated to promoting healthy VR. This app is a service of the institution, and will always be free to use. The VRHI is also dedicated to clear and transparent science, and we publish our methodology at our website at https://vrhealth.institute.
Compatible With Standard Bluetooth Heart Rate Monitors:
The VR Exercise Tracker is designed to be compatible with standard Bluetooth heart rate monitors. Here are a few models that we have tested and recommend:
- Polar H10 (tested and verified)
- Polar H7 (tested and verified)
The Official App of the VR Health Institute (Our Backstory):
In 2016, the VR Health Institute created the VR Health Rating system, an independent system for rating VR content using research-grade metabolic equipment. For three years, the VR Health Institute has been collaborating with the Kinesiology department at San Francisco State University to collect metabolic data on VR experiences using COSMED and PARVO metabolic carts.
These are the academic standard for metabolic research, and typically range from $75,000 to $150,000 each. Much of this data has already been published in peer reviewed scientific journals, or is pending publication.
How Can You Help?:
This project is both an emerging area of research and a passion project for our team. Various graduate students, researchers, companies, and industry experts have contributed. But it is still new, and we all need to work to make it better. Here are a few ways you can help the project, if you are interested:
- Please provide bug and feedback via the app feedback tool.
- Join our discord channel at https://discord.gg/wF3PYnB
- Encourage developers to submit games for rating by the VRHI
- Stick with us. We’re new to app creation. It’s a learning experience.
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