New company combines virtual gaming with physical exercise
Suit up friends! Today we are going to take you to the intersection where fitness and gaming cross paths.
This week I had the chance to interview my new friend Cameron Brookhouse, one of the designers of a new game company called Quell. According to Cameron, “Quell is the world’s first dedicated fitness gaming platform. The idea is that users can burn 600 calories per hour, a phenomenal workout while playing really high quality super exciting immersive gaming.
“The product breaks down into this kind of wearable device. The impacts, which adds real resistance to your motion, motion tracking with no VR headset or wires and some heart rate monitoring and haptics to enhance the immersion. The games that we make for the system, so our launch game Shard 4. There’s this fantasy fitness adventure where you run and leap and fight your way through this breathtaking fantasy world and get fit at the same time.”
When my generation thinks of video games, we remember the tiny remotes with three buttons that had wires, and you could only stand so far from the TV screen, which was also pretty small. But according to Cameron, this game system is relatively wireless. You just need a laptop. You can play it on your big screen. And he says you’ll need about one and a half meters of space. For those of us here in the US, that’s about five feet. And I would also advise that before you start throwing punches, you make sure there’s nobody in your bubble!
Cameron continues to describe how the gaming system works: “So you’ve got sort of two hand units that you can hold and then you have a chest unit as well. And what those devices are doing is monitoring thousands of thousands of data points to try and work out what motions you’re performing, what exercise motions. So if you’re in a fight and you’re throwing like a jab or a hook or an uppercut, the resistance is kicking in from the beginning of the punch. And that’s anchored to your back by a kind of belt system. And that kind of reaches its maximum at the end of the punch. The game understands that that’s what you’re doing. It knows how fast you’ve done it. And as we go, technique is like and it’s turning it into real time game data so you can kind of experience your motion live.”
You can play this game with your laptop, or you can play at your desk at work. Though I would recommend making sure your boss is not in your bubble! You can play on your big screen TV at home or travel. It goes everywhere with you. No wires and cables, no nothing. Right now, you can pick up your version of Quell on Amazon or their website, playquell.com.
