Video games aren’t usually associated with weight loss (in fact, the opposite is usually the case), but virtual reality has the potential to change that.
Job Stauffer, the head of creative communications for Telltale Games, revealed to UploadVR that he recently lost a whopping 50 pounds by playing a virtual reality game. Stauffer, who says he has always been heavy, reached his peak weight of over 300 pounds last summer — and that’s when his doctor told him it was time to get serious about losing weight. Not a fan of traditional exercise, Stauffer thought that maybe he could find a video game that would help him lose weight, even though he had been unimpressed with the fitness credentials of previous gaming examples like the Nintendo Wii. But once he tried exercising in VR, something clicked.
Today I’ve OFFICIALLY lost over 50lbs in 5 months using VR to punch my way through music. Thank you, @soundboxingvr & @htcvive! (…really!) pic.twitter.com/Uog139B01V
— Job J Stauffer (@jobjstauffer) February 15, 2017
“I knew that virtual reality could give the body a chance to engage content fully,” he said in the interview. “It also had an immediacy and simplicity that the other gaming weight loss platforms lacked. There was also this added layer of immersion that I thought could help me shut out the rest of the world and focus on just myself and the movements.”
His magic formula ended up being his HTC Vive and a game called Soundboxing, which syncs up to music of your choosing from YouTube and gives you targets to punch in tune with the beat.
Virtual reality has many potential applications, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of how it can change our lives. Maybe in the future, all the world’s gyms will be replaced by arcades. What a strange world we’ll have created then.
Title image courtesy of TriStar.
