A virtual reality based system for a more engaging indoor exercise biking experience

Lack of motivation and boredom ness while doing indoor exercises (in gym) can lead an individual to adhere less to his daily physical exercises. Their adherence to the exercise can be enhanced by making an exercise/task more enjoyable and exciting. To make such exercises more enjoyable and exciting, the gamification of these exercises can be done. Such gamification of these exercises often includes the use of expensive equipment and sophisticated systems that are unaffordable and hard to use for many people. The current study is aimed at developing a cheap and affordable solution for the gamification of the tradition cycling exercise in the gym and testing it's accuracy in counting the number of pedal rotations and rotations per minute (RPM). Minimal hardware has been used, which involves the use of smartphone placed in the user's pocket. The phone streams acceleration data wirelessly over internet to the PC running the gaming application. In the game, an avatar riding on a virtual bike in a virtual environment mimics the movement of a real user. The whole game scene is displayed on a flat screen placed in front of the user. Here, acceleration data is used to calculate the number of rotations of pedals and RPM. The percentage of expected deviation in the (RPM) calculated by the software with respect to the actual RPM is less than 2.