Resolving To Hit The Gym This Year? Get Into Shape With Black Box VR

A pair of savvy entrepreneurs doesn’t want your fitness-related New Year’s resolution to fail, so they made going to the gym fun — and virtual.

Ryan DeLuca, who created the nutritional supplement retail site Bodybuilding.com, and Preston Lewis, debuted at CES this week their new fitness venture Black Box VR. Black Box VR is a virtual reality gym that makes a game out of hitting the weights.

Founded on the principle that gaming triggers humans’ addictive response, Black Box VR is designed to feel like a game, promoting instant feedback and gratification for working out, according to the company. As a Black Box user, you go to a specific gym where you put on an HTC Vive headset and enter a virtual workout environment where you play a video game of sorts. The website promotes the game aspect as creating a situation where your body perceives an urgent situation and forces you to work (out) to overcome it.

Inside each “Black Box” environment is a real cable pulley system, much like those found in traditional gyms, that is powered by the virtual reality engine and responds to your abilities through artificial intelligence, increasing or decreasing the resistance and intensity as it detects your progress through the fitness regimen. The regimen is also adaptive, designed to help you defeat training plateaus.

“In Black Box you will utilize strength, agility, balance and speed in a larger than life virtual world where we are able to harness the nature that is brought out in video games — dedication, determination, and longevity — and turn it into real, physical workouts that challenge both mind and body,” Lewis said in an announcement of Black Box being named a CES Innovation Awards honoree.

According to the company, Black Box functionally works through a patent-pending Dynamic Resistance Machine that corresponds a necessary movement in the game to a real movement with the physical handle at a level of resistance that helps you push past obstacles virtually and in your fitness.

“This allows you to be fully immersed in the experience, while the number crunching, rep counts, weight counts and form tracking happens behind the scenes,” Lewis said in a statement. “Every successful rep you perform in the game corresponds to some action in the Black Box game, keeping you at the center of the action.” 

The company recommends a fitness plan of three 30-minute sessions per week, with various gameplay incentives for working out within certain periods of time. The Dynamic Resistance Machine also factors in rest between sets and measures exercise form to ensure it is proper. Bad form is reflected in gameplay, which can be you against yourself or in competition with another Black Box player.

Lewis also wrote that Black Box plans to open its first location in San Francisco, and that that location and each subsequent location will have at least 10 dedicated Black Box VR rooms.