Saturday, June 28, 2008

XRTZ in the news again!

6-28-08: This past week, XRTZ was featured on Fox 11 news. Check out the video clip, featuring kids and seniors into exergaming at the Zone!

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

New equipment; on Fox News again!

6-24-08: We recently just put in some new games in the Zone. Come in and check it out!

The first thing we recently added was this stepper called the Gamercize Pro Stepper. Richard Coshott, out of the UK, is the founder of Gamercize and definitely "European Exergaming Evangelist"! Here you see one of our senior staffers, Vicky, trying it out. We'll report back in a little bit to see how the response is to it.
Another game that we just got installed yesterday is called "Dogfight", a flight simulator combined with a recumbent bike. Check out their website, Electronic Sports and see a demo video of how it works. It's a blast! I played it this AM against Joel and within a minute or so, he blasted me out of the air and I had to eject and parachute to safety.

Here's a shot of Joel and his daughter, Cassie, putting it though it's paces.
A close of up what Cassie is seeing on this huge screen. You use the handles to turn and bank your plane.

Joe Dean is the creator of this cool game and it's being developed in the beautiful island of Cebu, Philippines. We are fortunate to be the 2nd facility in the US to have a pair, and will give it a good workout here in the Zone. Here, Joe and Joel are doing a dogfight.

The crew, all the way from the Philippines, pose for one final shot before they head to Utah for some R & R.

Both games are connected to the Internet, allowing for online competition with players anywhere in the world. Hopefully, we'll soon have competitions with players from other states and countries!

We'll be utilizing both of these games, along with the Wii Fit and other games, in our upcoming 3rd Annual XRGames in August, so stay tuned!

In other XRTZ news, we are making progress on our first extension location, the Drayson Center, Loma Linda University's fitness center. Here you can see the display we have at the entrance promoting the summer day camp and the July Grand Opening, and the 2nd picture is where this will be located (behind the wall). We're excited about this collaboration, not only to bring exergaming to more people, but to also further research in medicine at LLU. (The Drayson Center is my regular gym where I play r-ball, lift weights, and swim, so I'll be able to check in on this on a regular basis.)



Finally, XRTZ was featured on Ch. 11 Fox News last night and this AM! Joel Tivo'd it and we'll soon have the segment on our website. They did a great job on the piece in getting our message out there, and if you notice my voice, you're not hearing things--it does sound strange because I was just getting over a head cold! (This was shot shortly after I had returned from my 5th conference in 6 weeks and it finally caught up to me.)