Yourself!Fitness, meet Eyetoy: Kinetic
For the past two weeks I've been improving strength, balance, and flexibility with Maya, my PS2-based personal trainer. And starting to like yoga. My current favorite pose is Side Plank...
The Yourself!Fitness workouts are fun, varied, cheap, convenient, and really do feel like having a personal trainer there in the room with you. Still, there's room for improvement. Greater variety in types of exercise and better music would be welcome. And the "fun" factor is sometimes lost. Compared with something like DDR, interacting with Maya really does feel more like a workout than playing a video game. Great when you want that level of rigor, but sometimes you don't. Exercise with Maya is fun as exercise, because you feel like you're making progress, but it's not fun the way a regular videogame is. There's still room to explore the space between the two. What we need is some competition, a few more companies trying to do the same thing Maya does - make exercise convenient, fun, and comprehensive, personalized to your individual needs.
Enter Eyetoy: Kinetic.
Remember the "Kung2" game in Eyetoy: Play2? Kinetic uses the same general dynamic to teach fullblown fitness routines. Fast like cardio Kickboxing, or slow like Tai Chi. Plus it does warmups, cooldowns, and customized workout routines. The eyetoy camera lets you observe your form and compare it to the onscreen graphics.
EyeToy:Kinetic won't be available for another month - I'll be sure to snag a copy and give a full review then - but in the meantime, here's an excellent review comparing Eyetoy:Kinetic to Yourself!Fitness.
The Yourself!Fitness workouts are fun, varied, cheap, convenient, and really do feel like having a personal trainer there in the room with you. Still, there's room for improvement. Greater variety in types of exercise and better music would be welcome. And the "fun" factor is sometimes lost. Compared with something like DDR, interacting with Maya really does feel more like a workout than playing a video game. Great when you want that level of rigor, but sometimes you don't. Exercise with Maya is fun as exercise, because you feel like you're making progress, but it's not fun the way a regular videogame is. There's still room to explore the space between the two. What we need is some competition, a few more companies trying to do the same thing Maya does - make exercise convenient, fun, and comprehensive, personalized to your individual needs.
Enter Eyetoy: Kinetic.
Remember the "Kung2" game in Eyetoy: Play2? Kinetic uses the same general dynamic to teach fullblown fitness routines. Fast like cardio Kickboxing, or slow like Tai Chi. Plus it does warmups, cooldowns, and customized workout routines. The eyetoy camera lets you observe your form and compare it to the onscreen graphics.
EyeToy:Kinetic won't be available for another month - I'll be sure to snag a copy and give a full review then - but in the meantime, here's an excellent review comparing Eyetoy:Kinetic to Yourself!Fitness.
posted by Glen at 5:25 PM
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1 Comments:
love your blog.
do you know where to buy yourself!fitness that works on a european ps2?
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