Guy turns workout into British cycling adventure with virtual reality

Hands up, who doesn't hate exercise bikes -- those boring tools that demand that you pedal, pedal, pedal endlessly while some TV plays in the background.

Well, a particularly ingenious video game developer might have found a solution for that.

Aaron Puzey, an Australian who now lives in Scotland, has created an app for Samsung's Gear VR which will allow him to ride the length of Britain in virtual reality.

Using a Bluetooth cadence sensor to track how fast he's cycling, Puzey is making the virtual trip from Land's End to John O'Groats.

For his project, Puzey uses Google Street View images which have been recreated as spheres to allow him to move smoothly from one panorama to the next, and give the impression he's actually riding in a virtual world.

The results are variable as Puzey himself recognises:

"As you’ll see it has some… problems. But it’s still better than anything else out there," he wrote in his blog.

Puzey, who started his project in May and has currently reached north of Manchester, films each ride on a three part cut and makes comments on the scenery, on technical problems he encounters and funny things he finds while cycling.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

This is an example from his latest entry:

"Passed through Stockport on my way to Manchester and boy does it go on and on and on. This is my first really big city and I’m passing right through the middle. One thing I’ve noticed is the Google Streetview data works surprisingly well with big, tall buildings."

"I've been riding the exercise bike for years, just half an hour each day, but it's just a bit monotonous," Puzey told CNET. "I'd been day dreaming for a while about the possibility of using VR to make it a bit more fun and now of course the technology has arrived to make it happen."