A British man is attempting to cycle through the entire United Kingdom, stationary in his own home using a Samsung Gear VR headset.
The magical world of immersive virtual reality has been highlighted further, thanks to VR enthusiast Aaron Puzey. If going outside is the biggest hurdle for you to do some form of exercise, Puzey just might have the answer for you.
The VR enthusiast has set up an exercise bike and a Samsung Gear VR coupled with a Bluetooth cadence monitor (to measure RPM). The experiment would not work with these tools alone, so he went ahead and created an app that pulls Google Streetview data, to create his route.
Starting at Land’s End, Puzey will end his journey at John O’Groats. Both places are tourist destinations and are the most westward and eastward points in the UK, respectively. The entire journey is roughly 1,500km with Puzey aiming to complete the journey in 50 days.
Puzey wants to be the first person to cycle the length of Britain in virtual reality, a feat currently not know to have been completed by anyone. He also say it started out of boredom, from boredom he has created something simple yet genius.
“It feels convincing, it feels like I’m somewhere” Puzey said in his first video. Speaking to The Verge the VR lover expressed how interesting it’s been navigating a constrained 3D world. Google Streetview compresses the depth information, making depth perception a bit funny.
“”Some things, like buildings, fit very well to this model and look quite solid, but things like trees and hedges and anything lumpy often just looks a mess. I’ve also seen things like squashed bugs on the Google camera, bad colours in some scenes and strange black ‘sink holes’. However, even with those problems it still feels like I’m there.”
As of his recent blog post video, Puzey is currently in Manchester almost hitting the 7,500km halfway point. You can check his progress on his blog.
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