It’s a great time to be alive. We’re connected by social media, entertained by streaming services, and we can get virtually anything we want with the click of a button. But what about our health? The fitness industry is booming and it has never been easier to track your workouts or log meals with your phone, but how will these trends translate into the world of virtual reality? Here are just some of the ways tech intersects health in our increasingly digital lives.
How Tech Intersects Health
The connection between health and technology is a new one, but it’s been growing fast. Wearables and mobile apps have been used to track fitness goals for years now, with the help of virtual reality (VR) experiences and augmented reality (AR) apps becoming more popular as well.
AI has already started to make its way into wearables, with companies like IBM developing AI wearables that can monitor your vitals and even predict when you’ll get sick based on your activity level. However, all this is just the beginning of what could be a game-changing intersection between tech and health in the future of connected devices.
Exercising With Friends
If you have a favourite activity that is usually done with friends, such as playing together at your favourite online casino, there is every reason to believe that it will be done in the metaverse as well.
Let’s continue the online casino example to demonstrate this point. What’s become a key game in the online casino landscape is live casino. It seeks to bring the traditional, communal feel of land-based casinos to online casinos. Live dealers talk and interact with players. Players chat with other players in the chat box. It is social. It won’t take much encouragement for online casinos to embrace VR or AR and utilise this technology to further the live casino experience. The metaverse is the next step of this.
One of the great things about this future is that we will finally be able to go on vacations with our friends without needing to fly them across the country or plan months of time off work. We can go hiking together and take photos along the way. We can climb mountains together and take selfies at the top. In fact, if you love travelling but hate travelling alone, you’ll be able to do all sorts of fun things with friends from anywhere in the world at any time.
Bringing It Home
In the future, we expect that it will be possible to use a number of existing fitness devices in conjunction with VR. However, this is not likely to happen anytime soon. The first step will be integrating VR headsets into home exercise equipment like treadmills and weight machines. This integration will allow you to use them while wearing your headset and exercising in a virtual world. For example, you could run on a treadmill that simulates going up and down stairs or lifting weights at the gym while seeing yourself in front of an audience at an outdoor concert venue or even standing on stage performing with your favourite band.
It may also be possible to integrate fitness devices into VR games as well, for example, imagine having access within your game experience to data from heart rate monitors or another wearable tech that tracks calorie burn during gameplay. It isn’t unreasonable to think these things could one day interact with each other seamlessly so that everything works together seamlessly rather than independently as they do today.
Takeaway
Fitness is a big part of health, and it’s only going to get bigger as we move into the future. As technology advances, so will our options for exercise, but whatever happens, it’s clear that we need to work on making exercise more exciting if people are going to stick with it.
In the future, expect to see more virtual and augmented reality technologies being used for fitness purposes. Whether it be through integration with existing fitness apps or through their own brand-new ones, it’s clear that there is potential here. The question remains: Will these integrations actually happen?