With the new era of technology unravelling right before our eyes, we have been fortunate to witness many exciting gadgets. One such piece of technology is the fitness tracker. Fitness trackers have become an important part of many people’s lives, providing meaningful insight to their day to day life, allowing them to monitor their health closely.
The famous subsidiary of Facebook; Oculus, is intending to launch its own fitness tracker. Unlike conventional fitness trackers it is a VR fitness tracker. Labelled “Oculus Move”, the fitness tracker will be able to record movement, amount of calories burnt, and will offer much more across a variety of VR apps.
During this week’s Keynote at Facebook connect, Mark Zuckerberg broke this news right after the unveiling of the Quest 2.
“It’s a system-level fitness tracker that will help you keep tabs on how much exercise you are getting while playing your favourite VR games. It’s called Oculus Move, and it allows you to set goals and track them across the different games and apps.”- Mark Zuckerberg
When the user will wear the headset while playing games, the Oculus Move will be able to record time spent in movement, calories burnt and the intensity of workouts. It will also allow the users to set goals and keep a record of their workout history through the “Oculus Move dashboard”.
Not everything has been announced however, and the most important fact remains; how will it gather data? Will Facebook release a stand-alone fitness tracker, or will it provide the ability to pair the headset with other wearables: Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Watch etc.? These questions are expected to be answered by the end of the year.
The Oculus move is set to compete with YUR Watch— a VR fitness-tracking watch, which provides features such as calorie counting, estimated heart rate (which is calculated using Machine Learning, based on the user’s height and weight), current activity level and more.
