I was thinking it would be nice to exercise in VR, but I would have to pick something aerobic I wouldn't mind doing blindfolded, which rules out a lot, but I think a row machine could work.
So I'm imagining a pacific-island-navigate-by-the-stars simulator, maybe speed up time so 8 hours of night become 30 minutes of cardio. Choose a couple of islands to row between, get some directions of which star to follow, and get to work.
Good news: some water simulation and a night sky are probably just a library include away, right?
Bad news: would have to do something fancy to nail the motion sync, I was thinking an arduino and some hall effects, really just need to capture the bookends of each rep and adjust the video to match your movement. I guess goggles already do position tracking but I think I would basically want to predict the snap when you change directions, as even a few ms lag will ruin the immersion.
Alas, I am merely a web developer without so much as a pair of goggles, but I think this will be a good starter project on account of not needing to create any assets. Godot looks very promising. If anyone else has VR-but-good-for-your-body ideas I'd love to hear them.
Unreal has much better VR support with, basically, push button publishing. I would not choose anything else for VR.
An Oculus Quest is wireless with inside out tracking in 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) and has no problem tracking people jumping and ducking in games like beat saber.
Unreal will map the camera to the movement coming from oculus hardware and you just make your art and some basic visual scripting in blue prints to make a PoC.
This is a couple week(end)s of work to get an MVP.
I don't have a rower so wouldn't be able to help but good luck! Great idea and very doable. Although I will warn you sweating in a headset does feel icky with the included fabric pads.
Edit to add:
Sky is just a sky box (sphere) that rotates because stars in real life are effectively at infinity
Water simulation is limited by whatever else you are drawing. Older quest hardware will be limited by draw calls. This is why you see so much stylized art in VR games that are cross platform. You likely would want a simple vertex shader and not a fluid sim.
I've been doing a lot of Zwift (cycling) and am itching to make a VR cycling app, I just don't have the time or money to do it myself. If you manage to get something working for rowing I'd be happy to test it out, and to try and help get bike and steering sensor hooked up and try out a "paddleboat" mode or something. I'm also happy to chat about tech/dev side of it, I've been doing game dev for a while now, I'd be glad to tell you how I'd build it. Shoot me an email (joeld42@gmail.com) if you want to chat about VR fitness sometime.
btw, the Vive and the Quest2 both already do motion compensation, even if your game lags a little bit they reproject it so you don't notice if you drop a few frames, a big lag will still cause problems but the headsets take care of the predictive motion stuff.
I wrote a VR rowing simulator a while back using Unity, it's in the Apple app store as VR Rowing (with me as the author, John Keogh). The motion tracking is really easy, adding things like sealife is complicated. I was thinking about adding x, y, z, and yaw motion to make it more immersive.
So I'm imagining a pacific-island-navigate-by-the-stars simulator, maybe speed up time so 8 hours of night become 30 minutes of cardio. Choose a couple of islands to row between, get some directions of which star to follow, and get to work.
Good news: some water simulation and a night sky are probably just a library include away, right?
Bad news: would have to do something fancy to nail the motion sync, I was thinking an arduino and some hall effects, really just need to capture the bookends of each rep and adjust the video to match your movement. I guess goggles already do position tracking but I think I would basically want to predict the snap when you change directions, as even a few ms lag will ruin the immersion.
Alas, I am merely a web developer without so much as a pair of goggles, but I think this will be a good starter project on account of not needing to create any assets. Godot looks very promising. If anyone else has VR-but-good-for-your-body ideas I'd love to hear them.