If you work out quite a bit with your own VR headset, you might be familiar with the VR Health Exercise Tracker. The application, which comes from the VR Health Institute, is meant to accurately track your own fitness trends when playing VR games and allow you to see the progress that you are making. Now, one of the most-requested features for the app has finally been added.
For those on iOS devices, the VR Exercise Tracker now supports Apple Watch compatibility. This is one added element that the VR Health Institute says many users have been begging to receive for quite some time. The Apple Watch functionality with the app now allows users to track their heart rate with workouts being recorded to HealthKit, the native iOS program that is meant to help you track exercise statistics. For those who have Apple Watch devices, this really helps to streamline things quite a bit.
If you use VR games to work out a lot yourself, you can easily see how the VR Exercise Tracker, and how this new feature, will be quite beneficial. A lot of times, one of the main drawbacks when it comes to working out in VR is that if you aren’t playing a game that has been tailor-made to track your fitness goals, like Supernatural, for instance, it can be a chore to monitor just how active you’re being. Fortunately, the VR Health Exercise Tracker has been “built on hundreds of hours of VR-specific metabolic testing” to ensure that it accurately can see just how many calories you might be burning.
“An estimated 15% of virtual reality games burn enough calories during typical play to qualify as medium to intense exercise,” the VR Health Institute explains on its official site. “But general purpose fitness trackers struggle to predict calorie burn for new exercises, even with heart rate data. Since VR and AR are new, and each game uses a different set of muscles depending on the types of gameplay, there’s virtually no data that normal exercise trackers can use to estimate how many calories you burn during exercise.”
Even if you aren’t someone who has been pleading for Apple Watch compatibility with the app for quite some time, it might be a worthwhile program to download. With many around the world still quarantining indoors looking for new ways to stay in shape, the VR Exercise Tracker seems like a great way to continue ensuring that you’re meeting your own fitness goals.
For more information on the VR Exercise Tracker, you can head over to the application’s official website to read more. Conversely, you can also download it via the App Store and Google Play onto your own device right now.
