Geez, go outside for a run. Get some fresh air, smell the rain, say hi to the neighbors, watch houses being built, get chased by a dog, check the Little Library for something interesting, swallow a bug, see if anyone has a cool car in their garage.
I tend to agree—if you're at a point where you can do it. But for a lot of people VR will end up being better for the simple fact that it'll actually happen for them.
Personally, I do go on extended walks regularly, e.g. do a couple miles to the grocery store—but, I was trying to get back into an actual strength training routine after years of no formal workouts, just walking, and gaining skill in Beat Saber was actually the first stepping stone that eventually got me back into it. Just needed some kinda tiny success first, just some experience using my body in a relatively athletic mode again.
This sentiment is so predictable and boring. Also the article literally says the motivation was knee pain meant he couldn’t run more than a few minutes. Maybe people aren’t the cartoons you have in your head.
I suffered from knee pain from running, too. I was concerned I was going to cripple myself. I finally switched my technique from heel-strike to ball-strike. This dramatically reduced the impact load on my knees, and the pain faded away after a month or so and has not returned.
The reason this works is because your body is designed to ball-strike, the heel-strike is unnatural. The ball-strike enables the tendons in your feet to act as shock absorbers. Those tendons will hurt for a bit under the unaccustomed load, so it's best to back off the running a bit until they strengthen.
Be careful. I did the same and it worked fine until I started to run more than 15k at a time, when I started to develop issues with my metatarsals that still haven't gone away more than 6 months later. I saw a physio who specialises in running and he said that long-distance runners don't ball strike any more, it's more of a flat landing (so still not heel strike) and then you spring off from your ball. That stopped my feet really hurting after long runs, but as I say I'm still paying the price for pure ball striking.
VR is great. You don't have to spike your risk of skin cancer, you don't have to deal with allergies, you don't have to run along a road that constantly has drunken teenagers crashing into mailboxes, there are no mosquitos that will make your life miserable, and you can play with friends, regardless of the fact that they're traveling, or live elsewhere. You don't have to deal with motion sickness as you're driving to a more interesting location, and you don't have to comply to the schedule of your immediate environment.
But none of that is quite as important as what really matters: The real world is boring. If the parts accessible to everyone were half as interesting as a world defined in silicon, people wouldn't strap an LCD screen onto their face and spend all day in it.
$300 for a device that you can do your work in, watch movies with friends in, play pretty intensive, full-motion e-sports in, meet new people every single night without having to pay a cover fee in, and program your own world around your preferences in is a hell of a deal.
These things are popular because the real world sucks in comparison for 80% of the population. Not everyone's a dotcom bubble millionaire, not everyone attends any university, let alone a good one, not everyone lives in the suburbs or in an urban environment.
It's more fun to see someone stand up on a virtual stage and give a presentation to eighty people on something that wouldn't be significant in real life, like a mainline Linux kernel running in a written-for-this-talk RISC-V emulator inside of a pixel shader inside of the video game you're currently standing in's virtual world[1] than it ever could be to watch birds.
I have one of the best views imaginable in real life, with as much land as a person could want to mess around with vehicles, run, or make impromptu sleds to see how fast you can go down a steep hill without toppling, and it doesn't hold a candle to VR. Most of my hours spent outside now are based in running with my pet or walking through the woods, because there's no point in going outside every day for its own sake. If it weren't for my pet, I probably wouldn't spend more than an hour outside every day.
I run when the sun is lower in the sky because of skin cancer risk. For 6 months of the year, it's low enough that it isn't an issue any time of day. I also wear a hat and long sleeved shirt. I know this works because I don't have a tan. I've never been bitten by a mosquito when running, it's when I stop they get me.
As for it being boring, I zone out and work on my projects in my head when running.
Not sure why you'd bother with a spread with a view if you don't enjoy it.
"VR is great. You don't have to spike your risk of skin cancer, you don't have to deal with allergies, you don't have to run along a road that constantly has drunken teenagers crashing into mailboxes...()"
And what about your eyes? How healthy is wearing VR? :)
Sure, if you have a CRT strapped to your face, there might be a little risk. But an LCD screen is just about the most harmless thing imaginable for your eyes.
Dry eyes happen without LCDs, and CVS isn't actually bad for your health or the health of your eyes. Not to mention that most people don't get it, even if they're staring at a screen for most hours of the day. As someone who stares at a VR LCD screen for almost all of my workday with eyes that've gotten less dry as I've started using screens more, I'm pretty much convinced CVS is a myth.
(And, of course, there's the fact that no one has ever been able to reproduce a study on CVS... also not giving it a very strong case.)
I only listed things that I actually do with the headset.
I do all of my daily programming with it on, there are a bunch of applications to watch movies with IMAX-size screens with it on in multiplayer-synced virtual theaters, there are a surprising amount of full-motion sports, plenty of applications built around socialization including a bunch of games, and it's incredibly easy to develop applications for: It's just an Android device as far as software goes, and as of last year it uses the industry-standard OpenXR, so you don't really need to know much specific to the headset at all.
The only thing you can't do completely standalone that's mentioned in that comment is use that particular Linux-in-RISC-V-emulator-in-pixel-shader-in-VRChat, but that's sort of an edge case, as you can probably imagine. For that sort of thing, the Quest 2 works really well for PCVR, as long as you're not using a very specific configuration of Linux (Linux/Nvidia), or a Mac.
Going on a walk works for my mind, I can think really well walking or hiking.
But more intense exercise without a novel mental aspect (i.e. a game) interferes with my ability to think hard and I find myself constantly frustrated and/or bored.
Now if I could go on physical exhausting, mentally entertaining, medieval quests in the real countryside that would be great. Maybe sunshine, Vitamin D and augmented reality are waiting in my future.
I don't get either of you, at all. I greatly enjoy both.
I am not a serious runner, just ~20mi/week for health, but being outside, getting into that zone, the mental space for work/etc. as you mention (though math gets difficult with pace), or just listening to audiobooks as I watch the scenery change, it's great.
Weight training, on the other hand, is very technical. Mesocycles planned months out, tweaked as targets are crushed or missed, every set recorded with rates of perceived exertion, everything on timers, the constant strategizing over which variation of which accessory exercise might help with a particular sticking point and add a few lbs to a main lift in the long run. It's intoxicating.
I feel like people who find these things boring sat in a race car in a parking lot and decided race cars were boring.
I guess weight training is a means to an end that I want - health and fitness. It is not an end in itself, I don't enjoy it, and discovered that I cannot lift while thinking about something else.
I understand that if you love weight training for its own sake, the calculus is completely different.
Running can be a monotonous grind if you do it on a schedule. That’s assuming you live in a place with decent enough weather that lets you keep to that schedule year round.
It can be a monotonous grind, but it isn't for me. The difference is I "preload" my head with a problem I want to solve, and then solve it while running. It's very productive time.
Personally, I do go on extended walks regularly, e.g. do a couple miles to the grocery store—but, I was trying to get back into an actual strength training routine after years of no formal workouts, just walking, and gaining skill in Beat Saber was actually the first stepping stone that eventually got me back into it. Just needed some kinda tiny success first, just some experience using my body in a relatively athletic mode again.