Virtual reality fitness

Virtual reality fitness (also VR fitness) is physical exercise performed in virtual reality, usually with a head-mounted display and tracked hand controllers, in which a game or guided workout turns the user's body movement into the input. It covers dedicated fitness applications such as Supernatural, FitXR and Les Mills Bodycombat, active games that people play for exercise such as Beat Saber and The Thrill of the Fight, and exercise machines connected to a virtual environment. In academic writing the activity is often called VR exergaming or immersive virtual reality-enhanced physical activity.

Supernatural launched in 2020 as a subscription service on the Oculus Quest standalone headset. In 2021 TechCrunch called it "a particularly hot commodity" as more people looked for home workouts during widespread gym closures. In 2022 and 2023 the category was at the center of an antitrust case, when the United States Federal Trade Commission tried to block Meta Platforms' purchase of Within, the maker of Supernatural, alleging that "VR dedicated fitness apps" formed their own market. Laboratory studies have measured energy expenditure in several popular titles, with results that range from light activity to vigorous activity depending on the game and the player.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited sources: the nine papers via Crossref and PubMed abstracts, the FTC press release, National Law Review and TechCrunch case reporting, Meta blog, Supernatural FAQ, and the Road to VR, UploadVR, Engadget, New Atlas, PR Newswire, Computer Graphics World and tulrich.com pages. About review dates.

Definition and scope

The term has no single formal definition. Researchers distinguish immersive VR exercise, in which the user wears a headset, from non-immersive VR exercise, in which the virtual scene is shown on a screen. In consumer use the boundary runs between applications built mainly as workouts and games that happen to make the player move. The FTC drew this line in its case against Meta: it described Supernatural as "a popular virtual reality dedicated fitness app", said that Meta already took part in the broader VR fitness market with Beat Saber, and argued that the relevant market covered apps "dedicated" to fitness and excluded content where fitness is "incidental", such as exercise videos. In its January 2023 ruling the federal court accepted that market definition, while still refusing to block the purchase.

The examples covered in this article fall into three broad groups:

Form	How the user exercises	Examples
Dedicated fitness app	Coach-led or class-style workouts, usually striking targets in time with music, squatting under or dodging obstacles, and punching combinations	Supernatural, FitXR, Les Mills Bodycombat
Active game	A game whose mechanics require sustained arm, leg or whole-body movement; players use it for exercise even though it is not built as a workout	Beat Saber, The Thrill of the Fight, Gorilla Tag, Hot Squat
Equipment-based system	An exercise machine whose movement drives a virtual scene, with or without a headset	Tectrix VR Bike, VirZoom, Icaros

History

Screen-based machines in the 1990s

Exercise equipment linked to computer-generated scenes predates consumer headsets. Tectrix introduced the VR Bike in 1994, a stationary recumbent bicycle with a 20-inch monitor that showed the rider moving through virtual scenes. Its base tilted up to 13 degrees from side to side to imitate leaning into a turn, twin fans under the monitor blew air at a rate that rose with speed, pedal resistance changed with the apparent slope, and several bikes could be linked through an RS-232 serial port for races. A companion VR Climber followed a few months later. According to Computer Graphics World, both machines cost close to US$8,000, about twice what clubs paid for one piece of equipment, and both failed commercially. Thatcher Ulrich, who wrote software for the machines from 1992 to 1998, states that Cybex International bought Tectrix in 1998 and cancelled the VR products.

The same equipment prompted early research. In a 14-week field study published in 1997, James J. Annesi and José Mazas found that attendance among adults was significantly higher with virtual reality-enhanced cardiovascular exercise equipment than in the conditions without virtual reality, and that adherence was highest (83.33%) in the virtual reality bicycle group. Post-exercise feeling states did not differ between groups.

Headset-era hardware (2015-2016)

The arrival of consumer headsets in 2015 and 2016 brought new exercise hardware built around them. The German company Icaros offered a machine for pre-order in late 2015 on which the user kneels with elbows and knees in cradles and controls a game by leaning, sliding and tilting; it worked with the Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear VR, and the launch model was priced at about 7,500 euros before VAT. VirZoom opened pre-orders in December 2015 for a US$249 exercise bike with sensors, buttons and thumbsticks on the handlebars; riders pedalled to move and leaned to steer through games such as a winged-horse flight, and the company sold a US$9.99 monthly plan for fitness data and multiplayer. In UploadVR's November 2016 review the folding bike supported the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, had a heart-rate monitor in the handlebars, and offered seven games; the reviewer criticized its manual resistance dial.

Active games and calorie ratings (2016-2018)

Some games with tracked controllers proved physically demanding. In 2018 the Virtual Reality Institute of Health and Exercise, which rated games using oxygen-consumption testing and heart-rate monitoring, gave Beat Saber an average of 6.24 METs (metabolic equivalents), with a 60 kg player burning 8.57 to 9.86 kcal per minute. Road to VR noted that the figures came from four sessions by one experienced but not expert player. The institute put Hot Squat and The Fastest Fist at 6 to 8 METs and The Thrill of the Fight at more than 15 METs.

Subscription services on standalone headsets (2020-2023)

Within launched Supernatural on the Oculus Store for the Quest on April 23, 2020, as a subscription service that combined rhythm-game mechanics with daily full-body workouts and coaching from trainers; after a 30-day free trial, founding members paid US$19 per month. In July 2020 UploadVR reported that the London developer FitXR would replace its boxing game BOXVR on the Quest with a rebuilt app named FitXR on July 30, adding group classes for up to seven players. Les Mills Bodycombat, a licensed adaptation of the Les Mills martial-arts class developed by the Seville studio Odders Lab, followed on Meta Quest on February 3, 2022 at US$29.99; its workouts ask players to punch, knee-strike and squat to dodge walls.

Platform holders added system features. At Facebook Connect in September 2020, alongside the Quest 2, Facebook announced Oculus Move, a system-level tracker that counted calories and active minutes across any app and could show them as an overlay during play. In March 2022 Meta said Move stats could be synced, on an opt-in basis, to the Oculus phone app and to Apple Health. In October 2022 Meta began selling the Quest 2 Active Pack for US$70, with a wipeable facial interface made of PU and adjustable knuckle straps for the controllers; Road to VR noted that "stock Quest 2 headsets just aren't built with sweat in mind".

Meta announced its purchase of Within on October 29, 2021. Its vice president of play, Jason Rubin, said, "We believe fitness will be a massive success in VR." The FTC sued in July 2022; the FTC's press release quoted Within's co-founder and chief executive as saying "Fitness is the killer use case for VR". Judge Edward J. Davila denied the FTC's request for a preliminary injunction on January 31, 2023, the agency decided not to appeal, and the order allowed the deal to close on February 8. TechCrunch reported on February 9, 2023 that Meta had closed the purchase.

Contraction and spin-out (2025-2026)

Meta discontinued the Move app on March 31, 2025, removing it from Meta Horizon OS and the Meta Horizon phone app. On January 13, 2026, during cuts that also closed Meta's Armature, Twisted Pixel and Sanzaru Games studios, a note posted to the official Supernatural group on Facebook said that the service would "no longer receive new content or feature updates". In June 2026 the service's original founders announced that an independent company, Supernatural Health, would take it over. On August 26, 2026, UploadVR reported that the new app had a "Coming Soon" page on the Meta Horizon Store with no exact release date, and that Meta's existing version, renamed Supernatural - Legacy Edition, would remain available until December 3, 2026. The company's FAQ says it is aiming to relaunch in fall 2026, in the United States and Canada, at US$20 per month or US$200 per year. UploadVR reported that the independent team had about 15 staff, against nearly 200 at the original studio's peak.

Energy expenditure research

Measured intensity varies widely between titles. The studies below are small, single-session experiments in children and young adults. The authors of the 2024 Supernatural study wrote that the value of VR fitness games as moderate to vigorous physical activity had not yet been thoroughly quantified with gold-standard energy expenditure measures such as indirect calorimetry. That study was commissioned and funded by Supernatural, which helped design the protocol but, according to the authors, was not involved in conducting, analyzing or publishing it.

Study	Participants	Games	Method	Main finding
Evans et al., Games for Health Journal, 2021	36 young, healthy adults	Beat Saber, Holopoint, Hot Squat, Relax Walk VR (15 minutes each)	Heart rate reserve, perceived exertion, accelerometry	Only Hot Squat reached moderate intensity by heart rate reserve; Beat Saber and Holopoint were rated more enjoyable than Hot Squat and Relax Walk
Craig, Rhodes and Sui, JMIR Serious Games, 2024	23 young, active adults (12 female, 11 male)	Supernatural, Flow and Boxing modes at medium intensity	Indirect calorimetry (metabolic cart), compared with a waist accelerometer, an Apple smartwatch and the headset	Flow averaged 8.2 METs and Boxing 7.6 METs, both classed as vigorous; accelerometer and headset calorie figures differed significantly from the metabolic cart
Godfrey et al., Games for Health Journal, 2025	28 children (mean age 9.4)	Beat Saber, The Thrill of the Fight, compared with rest, a seated video game and treadmill walking at 5.6 km/h (10 minutes each)	Oxygen consumption and heart rate	Oxygen uptake of 9.1 mL/kg/min in Beat Saber (light to moderate) and 16.9 mL/kg/min in The Thrill of the Fight (moderate), against 17.1 mL/kg/min for treadmill walking and 4.3 mL/kg/min for the seated game
Boots et al., JMIR Serious Games, 2025	16 children (mean age 10.7)	Gorilla Tag, Beat Saber (15 minutes each)	Heart rate reserve, wrist and waist accelerometers, perceived exertion	Heart-rate intensity was light for Beat Saber and moderate for Gorilla Tag; both games were rated highly enjoyable

In these studies Beat Saber, which relies mainly on arm movement, produced light or light-to-moderate intensity, while Hot Squat, The Thrill of the Fight, Gorilla Tag and Supernatural's workouts reached moderate or vigorous levels by the measures used. Evans and colleagues also found that the games rated most enjoyable required mostly arm movement and a perceived light exertion, and the most demanding game in their study was rated less enjoyable.

Health outcomes

Systematic reviews describe promising but limited evidence. Mocco and colleagues reviewed 20 studies with 798 participants published between 2009 and 2023. Compared with traditional exercise and with non-immersive VR, immersive VR exercise was associated with greater enjoyment, lower perceived exertion and higher self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and exercise intention, and some studies reported larger gains in muscular strength and aerobic capacity than with traditional exercise. The authors rated nine of the studies weak, ten moderate and one strong in quality, and called for more rigorous research.

A 2026 meta-analysis in the Journal of Medical Internet Research looked only at randomized controlled trials of immersive VR aerobic or anaerobic exercise in older adults and people with acute or chronic health conditions or after reconstructive surgery. It included 26 trials with 846 participants. Pooled results showed no statistically significant difference from comparison groups, whether those groups exercised or not, for mobility and functional balance, functional leg strength, quality of life or other outcomes. Most outcomes carried "some concerns" or a high risk of bias, and the certainty of evidence was low or very low throughout. The authors concluded that VR may be a viable way to deliver exercise but that better trials are needed. Clinical uses of VR in rehabilitation and mental health are covered under Virtual reality therapy.

Safety and practical issues

Collisions and injuries

A headset blocks the user's view of the room. An analysis of United States emergency department data published in the journal Injury in 2023 covered injuries from VR use in general, not only exercise. The National Electronic Injury Surveillance System first recorded a VR-related injury in 2017, an estimated 125 cases nationally, and the weighted estimate rose to 1,336 emergency department visits in 2021. Fractures were the most common diagnosis (30.3%), followed by lacerations (18.6%) and contusions (13.9%); the hand, face, finger and knee were the most often injured body parts. The authors noted that injuries rose as sales of VR units increased, and wrote that although safety features are built into the devices, "the burden of cautious use rests upon the end user".

Cybersickness and aftereffects

Cybersickness can occur during exercise in VR. In a study of 36 adults who played Beat Saber for 10 and 50 minutes, no one dropped out because of sickness, and changes in eye accommodation and convergence returned to baseline within 40 minutes. Simulator sickness scores rose immediately after play and were higher after the longer session; about 14% of participants still reported high sickness 40 minutes after the 50-minute session, so the authors recommended a waiting period after leaving VR. In the 2025 study of children aged 8 to 12, two of 28 participants (7%) reported symptoms and neither asked to stop.

Calorie estimates and hygiene

Calorie figures shown by apps and headsets are estimates. In the 2024 Supernatural study, the calorie data from the headset and from a waist-worn accelerometer differed significantly from laboratory measurements. Sweat is also a practical concern: Meta's Active Pack for working out replaced the Quest 2's stock facial interface with a wipeable one.

See also

• Virtual Reality Use Cases
• Virtual reality therapy
• Supernatural
• FitXR
• Les Mills Bodycombat
• Beat Saber
• The Thrill of the Fight
• VirZoom
• Icaros
• Cybersickness
• Boundary system