Brit wants to cross the whole of Great Britain in VR on exercise bike

The Briton Aaron Puzey came up with a plan in May to cycle across the entire island of Great Britain with just an exercise bike, a Samsung Gear VR, a bluetooth cadence sensor, data from Google Maps and Street View and the Unity engine.

Since there was no ready-made system available to liven up his boring bike rides on the virtual reality stationary bike, Puzey decided to build it himself. The ultimate goal of his homemade VR app is to cycle all over the British Isle, from Land’s End in Cornwall to John O’Groats in Scotland.

Puzey had to overcome some hurdles to keep Google Street View’s panoramic images from bouncing in an annoying way because, as he writes on his developer blog, the Street View data is stored about every four meters and you jumps through ‘panoramic bubbles’. That would not be a pleasant way of cycling. Fortunately, there already existed a StreetView Explorer project by Paul Wagener on GitHub that allows a viewer to move freely through the Street View images without jerking.

Another obstacle was using the Unity engine. The data from the images comes in in eight parts and they have to be put together again for the final display. At Unity, this caused constant breaks in between, but this could be solved by preloading all the data for the route to be covered, which takes about ten minutes for a 30-minute bike ride.

He himself says in one of his videos that he suffers relatively little from motion sickness when he cycles, much less than when he moves with the VR glasses on without being physically active.

It seems like a logical form of VR for the foreseeable future. Of course there are still the necessary improvements to be made to his app, such as adding the possibility to also cycle backwards, displaying the number of kilometers left, investigating whether it is possible to display high-resolution textures when stationary, adding a bicycle model and display a live map image on the handlebars.

Puzey doesn’t think anyone will want to use the VR headset afterwards because it’s quite sweaty, he says around 11:48 in the video. He makes videos of the ‘highlights’ of every 100 kilometers he travels: