The popular VR game Beat Saber (available on the Oculus Store for the Rift and Quest and through Steam for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets) has been credited by one man, Robert Long, with helping him lose 200 pounds.
After an unfortunate series of car accidents that resulted in permanent injury to both his back and neck, Robert Long wasn’t sure how he’d recover. Stress hormones at the hands of depression caused Robert to gain weight, preventing doctors from making key procedures to his damaged back.
As a result, Robert began researching realistic exercise options for someone in his unique position, eventually leading him to purchase an HTC Vive, as well as a copy of the massively popular VR rhythm game, Beat Saber.
“It worked for me because it drew in my inner child so I was able to give my all and have fun doing it,” spoke Robert in a Reddit post directed at the Beat Saber community. “If you give this workout and game your all, you will see some amazing results. Who knows you all may even fine-tune this workout better than I even have now.”
VRFI: What would you say to someone who is searching for a workout and wants to use VR for weight loss?
Rob: That the most important part of this is if you want to use Beat Saber as a workout, you have got to love what you are doing. If you label it in your mind as a routine chore you have to do. Then you will be less likely to use it. That’s why you have got to remind yourself that this is not a workout. It’s having fun! And the fun you have will reward you with better health. Because if you are not into working out and lack the motivation, then you will not see the numbers lost that you want. So I recommend in letting out your inner child to play. Clear your mind of all the adult things like stress and try to not bring them into the game. That way when you play, it’s so much fun that you can hardly stop playing. The max I have gone at once is a little over an hour at once. So if you can manage it, enjoy it. The weight will come off. But if you really want to see good numbers you got to give it 100%. None of that slow-moving and standing still. You need to keep that body active.
I can confirm this is true. I lost 200 pounds so far playing. I got 70 more to go. Had to take a break due to a blown out right shoulder. Then I got better and my grandmother is now about to pass. So it’s always something I swear… So I hope to get rid of that last 70 pounds soon!.
As someone who also needs to lose a significant amount of weight, I find Rob Long’s story inspiring. Hopefully, you will too!
This is a blog devoted to social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse, so I usually don’t cover non-social VR experiences (i.e. those you visit alone). But I’m going to make an exception for an experience showcased at the SIGGRAPH 2019 conference in Los Angeles.
There’s no shortage of sophisticated mixed reality hardware at Siggraph, but I was most impressed by a piece of software that really demonstrated VR’s educational and experiential potential. Christopher Evans, Paul Huston, Wes Bunn, and Elijah Dixson exhibited Il Divino: Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling in VR, an app that recreates the world-famous Sistine Chapel within the Unreal Engine, then lets you experience all of its artwork in ways that are impossible for tourists at the real site.
The demo was created exclusively for the SIGGRAPH 2019 Immersive Pavilion, by the team behind the previous SIGGRAPH 2017 VR piece: Il Gigante: Michelangelo’s David in VR. Debuting at SIGGRAPH on Valve’s INDEX headset, Il Divino delivers an experience of the highest fidelity –you can see individual cracks and brush strokes in the plaster!
Attendees can step onto Michelangelo’s own scaffold to learn about how he painted the ceiling, or enter a Vatican conservator’s mobile aerial platform to see the ceiling up close, and learn about the controversial cleaning. In all, there are over 100 clickable elements connected to an hour of commentary talking about Michelangelo’s monumental work.
Later this year, it will be released to all as a freely downloadable experience, and it will continue to be added to and improved in the future.
This reminds me of a virtual recreation of the Sistine Chapel in Second Life, which I visited sometime in 2007 or 2008 (unfortunately, it is no longer available to visit):
My angel avatar visit the Sistine Chapel in Second Life (circa 2007)
Facebook Reality Labs has published a research article in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics, which shows cutting-edge avatar facial animation using multiple cameras attached to a VR headset, and a new multiview image processing technique. (The full paper is free to download from the link above.) The researchers also gave a presentation at the SIGGRAPH 2019 computer graphics conference in Los Angeles.
The results are impressive, giving an avatar human-driven, lifelike animations not only of the lower face but also the upper face, which of course if covered by the VR headset:
This is light years ahead of current avatar facial animation technology, such as the avatar facial driver in Sinespace, which operates using your webcam. Imagine being able to conduct a conversation in VR where you can convey the full gamut of facial expressions while you are talking! This is a potential gamechanger for sure. It’s not clear when we can expect to see this technology actually applied to Oculus VR hardware, however. It might still be many years away. But it is exciting!
The method of loci (also referred to as memory palaces, memory places, or memory spaces) is a technique for remembering information which dates back to the ancient Greek poet Simonides (who lived circa 556 — circa 468 B.C.).
According to a legend passed on by Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.), the discovery occurred at a banquet in Thessaly which Simonides attended in order to present a lyric poem written in praise of the host. Simonides was called outside shortly after his performance, and during his absence the roof of the banqueting hall suddenly collapsed, crushing the other diners, and mangling many of their corpses beyond recognition. Simonides, however, found he was able to identify the bodies (important for proper burial) by consulting his visual memory image of the people sitting around the banqueting table, which enabled him to identify the corpses according to where they were found. From this experience,
[Simonides] inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty [of memory] must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it. (Cicero, De Oratore, II, lxxxvi – translation: Sutton & Rackham, 1942).
Supposedly, this was the origin of the mnemonic technique known as the method of loci, described by Roman rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintilian (c.35-c.95 C.E.), and widely employed, in various forms, by orators and others from classical, through medieval, and up until early modern times.
Memory palaces help people remember information by taking advantage of the brain’s natural ability to spatially organize thoughts and concepts. The user associates information with objects and locations in a three-dimensional environment. Here’s a summary of the technique if you are interested in learning it.
A recent academic research paper by Eric Krokos, Catherine Plaisant, and Amitabh Varshney at the Univerity of Maryland, published in the journal Virtual Reality, has shown that people accessing virtual memory palaces in virtual reality (i.e. using a VR headset) were able to remember things better compared to people accessing the same memory palace using a flat computer desktop and mouse. (The research paper is Open Access, which means anybody on the Internet can download and read it without having to pay a publisher, in this case, Springer. You can access the paper for free using the link above, just click on the blue Download PDF button in the upper right-hand corner.)
I was pleased to discover this article, as the experiment was very similar to one that I wanted to conduct in my wildly overambitious research proposal, which unfortunately I had to suspend work on for various practical reasons. (I am currently writing up a paper about my experience. I am now working on developing a new research project involving virtual reality and libraries.)
In the University of Maryland study, testing was done using pre-constructed medieval town and palace environments purchased through TurboSquid, and 42 pictures of the faces of famous people. The pictures of the faces were hand-positioned in the 3D environment. Study participants were given a list of the pictures and names to study before the experiment. Next, each participant was given access to the memory palace, using either a VR headset or a or a desktop monitor with a mouse. Then, they had 5 minutes to study the memory palace with 21 pictures scattered throughout it. Then, in the recall phase, the pictures of the faces were swapped out with numbers, and participants were asked to give a name and level of confidence for their recalled faces for each numbered position. Each study participant was tested in both the town and the palace scenes, and both in VR and desktop mode. (If a face was shown in one set, it was not repeated in the second set. The 21 faces were presented all at once, and users were able to view and memorize the faces in any order of their choosing.)
Images Taken from the Research Paper
Statistical analysis of the experimental results supported the study’s hypothesis that a virtual memory palace experienced in an immersive VR headset led to a more accurate recall than on a mouse-controlled desktop display. Study participants in VR headsets also had a higher level of confidence in their answers than desktop users. A news report on the research project from the University of Maryland website states:
The results showed an 8.8 percent improvement overall in recall accuracy using the VR headsets, a statistically significant number according to the research team.
In post-study questionnaires, all 40 participants said that they were completely comfortable—and adept—in navigating a desktop computer to access information, yet all but two said they preferred the immersive VR environment as a potential learning platform. The questionnaire also found that only two people said they felt “uncomfortable” using VR.
Many of the participants said the immersive “presence” while using VR allowed them to focus better. This was reflected in the research results: 40 percent of the participants scored at least 10 percent higher in recall ability using VR over the desktop display.
In fact, there is already a VR app available which allows you to construct memory palaces and explore them in your VR headset. The product is called Munx VR:
Munx is a VR platform for building memory palaces to learn huge amounts in short time and with full retention. By combining medieval memory techniques with modern technology, we are redefining the way we learn, understand, and retain information in our minds. Imagine knowing the periodic table in the same way you know the layout of your living room, or being able to recall a president or ruler with the same effortlessness of reaching for a mug when making a cup of tea.
