 So I feel like I'm just in this giant stadium where all of these people are standing around watching me do chest presses. This is mildly unnerving. Would you be more or less inclined to exercise if you were wearing this on your face? We're about to find out. This is Black Box VR. It's a Boise based company that has designed a VR workout experience. The idea being that if you normally get bored or you just feel unmotivated at the gym, that transporting yourself into a hyper competitive virtual world will make you feel not that way. All right we're ready. All right. Ready? Yes. Let's go in the black box. Okay so what I'm gonna do is we're gonna, this is the suiting up here. So this is your left hand so go ahead and put that out and I'll suit you up here. These are hands-free controllers that you strap to your wrist so the app can track your movements. You strap those on, you put on an HTC Vive headset which is tethered to the cable machine and you enter a virtual stadium. That's where your opponent stands waiting and you're basically supposed to do more chest presses than they do. Put your back against the pad. There's a pad right behind you. Yep perfect. Got it. Okay now you just can see start doing reps. So did you guys also make this gym equipment? Yeah so this is actually a patent-pending dynamic resistance machine that's specifically built to work with VR. So the idea there is that there's a dynamic resistance that can adapt to in-game elements. So yeah so this is just a bite-sized piece of actual gameplay. In the full version you'll actually be able to select which movements you want to do and the machine will immediately calibrate for you. It's definitely getting harder. It's getting heavy. It's really, so the machine is adjusting because it knows my reps. Yep it's counting your reps. So you're I think probably on 10 or 12 right now. There you go. Good job. So if I, and I'm trying to defeat this person in front of me on the screen or is that me? Yep. Oh good job. That's the opponent. Is that the opponent? Okay. So can I do this with friend? Oh my good lord. Nice okay good job. Gave it your all. Yeah so eventually you'll actually be able to do this asynchronously with a friend and you could actually battle them. Right now this is just a computer, an AI that's basically is measuring your strength and adapting to it. And are you planning on selling this directly to people like me or are you gonna sell this to gyms? So phase one is we're actually looking at later this year opening up a our own boutique gym. And so we'll actually have these boxes inside our own gym. We can come in, there'll be a hero trainer that will walk you through make sure everything's safe and then go through a calibration phase where everything is perfectly dialed in for your height, for your goals, for your strength, for everything. So you'll be going to a gym that's entirely VR experience. Exactly. Every station's VR. Exactly. So this pod right here so we're in about a 10 by 10 space. So you imagine going into a gym and you actually have you know 10 to 20 of these where you actually go into your own black box and you have your private space just like this it would literally exactly like this. It seems like someone could probably have the wrong form you know doing a lunge or a squat or something like that depending on where their knees are and if that's not measured precisely they could potentially hurt themselves. Exactly that's one of the biggest problems and the good thing is with these base stations that they can track it's such a fine fine fidelity that as those sensors get better we can actually track exact biomechanics and again course correct to make sure that people aren't injuring themselves. That was a pretty wild experience I don't think I've ever worked out in VR before and I think the novelty of it threw me a little bit at first like I wasn't really paying attention to the game aspect of it but that's supposed to be a big part of this whole black box experience. The company says that they plan to launch a series of boutique gyms think like Equinox, Barry's Bootcamp, Soul Cycle sometime in mid 2018 and I think they're gonna start on the west coast. That sounds like it's kind of gonna be expensive just to go work out with a VR headset on but hey we live in the future I guess the future's expensive. So is this the next level of working out? I just had to say next level. Tune in next season. TBD next level.