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One morning about ten years ago I woke up convinced I had a Big Money Idea. I didn’t think that I would make money from it; but I figured someone would. The idea was that the first mass-market penetration of virtual reality would be in exercise bikes. The idea arrived with a bunch of reasons, like:

• High-end exercise bikes were already big-ticket luxury items, and already featured “courses” with varying degrees of “hills.” So the marketplace seemed like it would welcome expensive early generations of a product line, and VR seemed like a logical extension of existing product behavior.
• The more-or-less stationary position of the rider’s head (as compared to jogging, say) would accommodate bulky headgear in early design/engineering iterations
• As far as 3D-modeling projects go, making realistic terrain is cheap and easy.
• Modeling a bike moving in a 3D environment is basically 3 types of movement: forward/backward velocity, turning left or right, and leaning left or right. It’s cake compared to most other VR applications.
• It would be easy to build a game-like component into it — compete against the performance of famous bike racers (with some sort of handicapping system, most likely).

I even had a marketing slogan: “Ride the Tour de France . . . in the comfort of your living room.”

I mentioned it to a business-savvy friend in an off-hand way, and he got excited. We kicked it around over after-work glasses of vigorous young cabernets for a week or a so, before my friend sadly concluded that:

• I wouldn’t know the ghost of business plan if it haunted me every night. In particular, I had no clue what it would cost to build a working prototype.
• We couldn’t figure a way to present our concept to an exercise bike manufacturer without simply getting cut out of the deal, and neither of us knew beans about the business of selling sports equipment.

Much more recently i suddenly saw the flaw in my logic. I was thinking about what would be easy to build, not what people would want. I’m sure some exercise bikers would be happy to pedal through simulated French countryside, but most would rather put on their iPods and/or watch TV. Marketing technology shouldn’t be driven by figuring out what’s easy-to-do and trying to make people want it. It needs to be about figuring out what people are really going to want, and then building it.

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Ten years on, I think games like Dance Dance Revolution and platforms like the Wii are the actual first mast-market penetrations of virtual reality. They’re not immersive, so you may not agree that they count as VR, but they definitely take interacting in virtual environments a huge step beyond from keyboard/mouse/joytsick.

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