When you can’t ride around the world you can VZFit around the world!

Unlike other VR fitness games, you’ll need some extra equipment for this one: either an indoor stationary bicycle or elliptical trainer plus a cadence sensor if you don’t have a smart bike or trainer. With those, your Quest/Quest 2, and the two apps VZFit Explore and VZFit Play you can bike any of the 10 million miles around the world covered by Google Street View or play various first-person games with your equipment as your vehicle. (There’s technically an option to play without equipment, but it involves making weird moves that aren’t very fun or comfortable, so we can’t recommend this without the equipment.)

Bike ride options include curated rides, rides designed by others in the community, or your own personal tours. In game mode you can race an F1 car, fly a Pegasus or a helicopter, or ride a horse, among others. Given that VZFit comes from the same creative minds behind Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Central, you expect it’s going to be well-done.

Since we don’t have our own equipment at home we headed off to the gym to try it out. We had a lot of trouble getting the cadence sensor attached to the spin bike at the gym, and then in getting the headset to recognize the sensor even though we’d already paired them at home, so we’re hesitant to recommend this if you don’t have your own equipment where you just set it up once, unless you have a lot more patience than we do. When it does work it’s quite fun and makes that time on the exercise equipment a bit more bearable.

Given that extra equipment is needed you won’t find this app in the Oculus store at this time (due to Oculus’s current requirements that no extra equipment be needed for apps in their store), so you’ll need to take a few extra steps to get it loaded. Go to vzfit.com to create an account and check that you have the compatible equipment, then follow their instructions to get set up and to load the apps onto your headset. A stand-alone version that does not need extra equipment (and will thus be available in the Oculus store) is expected to launch in this first quarter of 2021, but we’re having trouble envisioning how this will work without equipment.

You can play VZFit Play offline but will need to get online at least once a week to refresh the membership license. VZFit Explore requires an internet connection with a minimum bandwidth of 5 Mbps.

VZfit has membership-based pricing, with two options: a free option with access to one free game per week and one curated ride per month, or a full access option at $9.95/month or $99/year, both with free one-week trials.