Oculus Move VR Fitness Feature Will Track How Many Calories You Burn

Amid its various virtual reality announcements today, Facebook revealed that Oculus users will soon get access to fitness-tracking features, capitalizing on the growing trend of exercising with a VR headset strapped to your face. With these features, users will be presented with a simple record of their activity, including the information they want the most like calories burned and minutes (or hours) spent active.

VR-based fitness is still a niche activity, but it is growing rapidly. Hit rhythm-based game Beat Saber is arguably still the most popular game for getting active in VR, but others have also risen, including boxing games, other rhythm-based games, and — most recently — some games designed specifically to help users get moving and burning calories.

Later this year, Oculus will begin to 'gradually' roll out its new Oculus Move feature, a fitness-tracker that will show which games you've played recently, how long you played them, and how many calories you burned. The catch? You'll need one of the Oculus Quest VR headsets; it won't be made available on the Rift S, which has been officially discontinued by Facebook.

If you can get past that disappointment, there's some good news — the Oculus Move fitness tracker is fairly sophisticated despite its simple interface, including a goal feature to see how much work you've accomplished toward whatever your goal is, as well as support for multi-day streaks, the time of day each game was played, and similar things.

Oculus Move is a unified dashboard that will be made available on the Oculus Quest and the newly announced Quest 2. This is part of Facebook's big Oculus announcements today, which include improvements to casting, plans to exit Oculus Link from beta next month, and, of course, the discontinuation of its Rift product family.