It's no DDR, tho. 
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JOSH TORRISI'S biceps are burning. His pecs are sore. There's a film of sweat on his forehead. But Mr. Torrisi hasn't been to the gym in nearly a week. He has just finished playing a video game.
A Maryland start-up company has put together a new game pad that builds up more than a player's thumbs. Instead of maneuvering with the standard set of miniature joysticks, users of the kiloWatt controller from Powergrid Fitness (www.powergridfitness.com) steer a shoulder-high steel alloy pole.
The device is due to reach stores in June. Its $700 price tag may exceed the grasp of most gamers. But to a panting Mr. Torrisi, a 26-year-old advertising executive, there was no question that just a few minutes of pushing against the kiloWatt's metal rod made for a serious workout.
"This hurts so good," he said after trying out the machine at Play, an arcade and lounge in Greenwich Village.
A Powergrid co-founder, Phil Feldman - a 10,000 mile-per-year bicyclist - said that exercise machines bored him. There is no competition on a treadmill, "so there's never the kind of intensity you see in sports," he said. "You never push into that level of pain." During a particularly bad winter in 1996, Mr. Feldman could not go bike riding, and he could not stand the StairMaster a minute longer. So he fused some bicycle parts and connected the contraption to a high-end computer workstation running a custom-built flight simulator.
About the size of a compact car, the hang-glider-like apparatus wasn't exactly built for the den. And it would not work with the off-the-shelf games made for twitching thumbs, either; it took too much effort to control.
"When you swing more than 200 pounds of meat and metal around, the lag times are very, very long," Mr. Feldman explained.
He and his partner, Greg Merril, knew that a commercial version of the workout machine would have to move joystick-quick so players could flex through their favorite titles.
It wasn't until 2002 that Mr. Feldman figured out how to make that happen. Now instead of measuring motion, sensors pick up force, much the way a bathroom scale registers what you weigh, not how you step on it.
When a player pushes and pulls on the kiloWatt's steel rod, sensors pick up microscopic flexes of the metal. A processor calculates how many pounds of force the player is exerting and converts the pressure into on-screen action.
The player hardly moves, but the small motions and the constant isometric pressure can be strenuous.
After a couple of laps of Grand Turismo 3, "I had to tell myself, 'Push it, push it,' " said Jay Brown, a 32-year-old photographer from Brooklyn. "In the middle of the game I thought I might throw in the towel."
Game play more than doubles oxygen consumption and increases players' heart rates by about 50 percent, according to a preliminary study of 15 people using the machine. The tests were conducted by Dr. Dan Drury, an assistant professor of health and exercise sciences at Gettysburg College who is serving as a consultant to Powergrid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/05/t...&en=43711afb180809a5&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
---
JOSH TORRISI'S biceps are burning. His pecs are sore. There's a film of sweat on his forehead. But Mr. Torrisi hasn't been to the gym in nearly a week. He has just finished playing a video game.
A Maryland start-up company has put together a new game pad that builds up more than a player's thumbs. Instead of maneuvering with the standard set of miniature joysticks, users of the kiloWatt controller from Powergrid Fitness (www.powergridfitness.com) steer a shoulder-high steel alloy pole.
The device is due to reach stores in June. Its $700 price tag may exceed the grasp of most gamers. But to a panting Mr. Torrisi, a 26-year-old advertising executive, there was no question that just a few minutes of pushing against the kiloWatt's metal rod made for a serious workout.
"This hurts so good," he said after trying out the machine at Play, an arcade and lounge in Greenwich Village.
A Powergrid co-founder, Phil Feldman - a 10,000 mile-per-year bicyclist - said that exercise machines bored him. There is no competition on a treadmill, "so there's never the kind of intensity you see in sports," he said. "You never push into that level of pain." During a particularly bad winter in 1996, Mr. Feldman could not go bike riding, and he could not stand the StairMaster a minute longer. So he fused some bicycle parts and connected the contraption to a high-end computer workstation running a custom-built flight simulator.
About the size of a compact car, the hang-glider-like apparatus wasn't exactly built for the den. And it would not work with the off-the-shelf games made for twitching thumbs, either; it took too much effort to control.
"When you swing more than 200 pounds of meat and metal around, the lag times are very, very long," Mr. Feldman explained.
He and his partner, Greg Merril, knew that a commercial version of the workout machine would have to move joystick-quick so players could flex through their favorite titles.
It wasn't until 2002 that Mr. Feldman figured out how to make that happen. Now instead of measuring motion, sensors pick up force, much the way a bathroom scale registers what you weigh, not how you step on it.
When a player pushes and pulls on the kiloWatt's steel rod, sensors pick up microscopic flexes of the metal. A processor calculates how many pounds of force the player is exerting and converts the pressure into on-screen action.
The player hardly moves, but the small motions and the constant isometric pressure can be strenuous.
After a couple of laps of Grand Turismo 3, "I had to tell myself, 'Push it, push it,' " said Jay Brown, a 32-year-old photographer from Brooklyn. "In the middle of the game I thought I might throw in the towel."
Game play more than doubles oxygen consumption and increases players' heart rates by about 50 percent, according to a preliminary study of 15 people using the machine. The tests were conducted by Dr. Dan Drury, an assistant professor of health and exercise sciences at Gettysburg College who is serving as a consultant to Powergrid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/05/t...&en=43711afb180809a5&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
