I'm amazed at what technically minded people can throw together in their garages. Here's a guy who may one day enable us to take virtual bike tours across the US without leaving home.
He calls it Stationary Cycling through Google Street View. It's a huge improvement over what I used to do.
Back in the days when I spent most of my time either working or commuting, I set up my bicycle in a woodworking shop the previous homeowner had built in the back yard. I called it the “Men's Crisis Center” and spend 15 minutes to an hour there several nights a week on my trainer.
The music pumping over the earphones wasn't enough to keep me my occupied, so I pulled out my TransAmerica bike maps and started a virtual cross-country ride. It took a lot of imagination to recall what the scenery had been like, but I covered from 3 to 15 miles a night.
Over two winters, I had made it from Yorktown to about halfway across Kansas.
Street View
Here's a guy who has set up a virtual reality system for stationary bicycling using Google Maps Street View on his browser. Basically, his spinning bike wheel tells Street View how far he's progressed from his starting point, and his VR goggles tell Street View which way he's looking. The 360-degree landscape from Street View reproduces the scene in his goggles.
If Street View ever shows all the blue highways on the TransAmerica map, he could experience a cross-country ride right there in his garage. What the hell, he could take any busy streets or freeways that he wants to, for that matter. He really doesn't have to worry about traffic.
For added realism, all he needs to add are virtual dogs chasing his bicycle through Kentucky and a device to tighten the flywheel on his trainer to reproduce climbing steep terrain.
Drawback
The virtual bicyclist says there's been a drawback:
The irony of this project is, well, while it's supposed to help me entain myself while using the exercise bike, the project itself has been keeping me from exercising. Oh well.
He says at his website that he'd be “thrilled” if someone took it and made a decent implementation out of it. He admits it's still a work in progress with some bugs.
He explains the hardware and software used in the project, as well as makes available the street-view riding code.
Good luck on this project to all you techies.
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