[Researchers at the University of Bath are refining their innovative, theory-based, presence-evoking training program for virtual reality that lets users (seem to) race multiple previous and future versions of themselves. The project is described in this story from Triathlete, where the original version includes a 9 second video.

Note: ISPR Presence News is taking a short hiatus and will return on Monday June 30, 2025.

–Matthew]

This Virtual Reality Training Program Pits You Against Yourself (And It Works)

Chasing your own past best performance could be the key to leveling up in any endeavor.

By Elaine K. Howley
June 18, 2025

From Miguel Cervantes and Christophe Marlow to William Shakespeare and John Donne, many of the foremost writers down the ages have noted the veracity of the phrase: Comparisons are odious. But comparisons, alas, are also ubiquitous and often unavoidable.

Sadly, this fact can become an enormous obstacle for some people who are trying to get fit or improve physical performance, explains  Dr. Christof Lutteroth, director of the REVEAL Centre for Immersive Technology at the University of Bath in the UK.

“For many people, especially when you’re not fit, it’s really hard to get into exercise because there will always be plenty of people much, much fitter and much, much better than yourself,” Lutteroth says.

But what if you could eliminate the other person in making comparisons and instead, make meaningful measurements against your own previous self? That’s the concept driving a new virtual-reality exercise program Lutteroth’s team has developed called “Race Yourselves.”

You versus you, virtual-reality style

Using tools from our brave new world of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, Race Yourselves aims to solve the age-old problem of how to improve performance without sinking into the mire of unattainable comparisons.

“Virtual reality can create illusions that help you and encourage you,” Lutteroth says.

This highly accessible approach requires only a stationary bike and a virtual reality (VR) headset to get started – any stationary bike or trainer will do.

“Literally, you can take your old, rusty 20-year-old exercise bike from the basement and just sit on it and put the headset on and adjust it and it’ll work to pick up your movements,” Lutteroth explains.

Algorithms running on the VR headset interpret motion to gauge cadence, creating pace data that’s recorded in the game. Then, the next time you return, your past performance appears as a ghost avatar alongside your current effort.

The more you use the game, the more ghost racers – all previous versions of yourself – show up to motivate you to go faster. “If you play it 10 times, you’re basically racing in a crowd of 10 other racers,” Lutteroth says.

This allows you to see your past performance in the context of your current performance, enabling you to track your progress as you move, rather than just a bunch of numbers on a screen after you’ve finished a game. This “allows you to compete against yourself, which is really the best competition that you can possibly get,” Lutteroth says, because you know you’ve already achieved that level before.

Lutteroth and his team compared the Race Yourselves game to HIIT training to determine which would boost performance more. “The results were really surprising and very encouraging,” he says. “Both groups improved their performance quite significantly, but the people playing Race Yourselves improved their performance about twice as much over just a couple of weeks,” he says.

The team also published results from their 2020 study, which found that stationary bike users get fit twice as fast when they race against multiple versions of themselves rather than pedalling alone or against strangers.

Currently, Race Yourselves focuses on cycling – primarily for safety reasons related to wearing VR goggles while exercising – but Lutteroth is hopeful they’ll be able to expand applications to other sports in the future.

“We’re looking at rowing and we’re keen to get in touch with athletes who might be interested in this. We’re happy to evolve it and put things in that people find valuable for their own training,” he says.

The psychology of racing yourself

While on the surface, Race Yourselves may seem like just another training app or a gamification of stationary bike training, it actually has deep, research-based roots in how humans learn and improve performance over time that Lutteroth and his team have been investigating in the lab.

The game relies on the psychological theory of self-determination, a framework for understanding human motivation and personality. This theory focuses on intrinsic motivation: “Basically, what makes us happy from the inside as opposed to extrinsic motivation such as material rewards,” Lutteroth says.

In psychology, self-determination describes the feeling of being more motivated when you have the autonomy to make your own choices. That empowerment fuels intrinsic motivation, which means you feel in greater control over your life and your choices.

A key component of this intrinsic motivation is perceived competence, or confidence in your abilities. Competing against yourself is the primary way to gain experience and the evidence that you can succeed. This is part of why training for a challenge works – you learn to trust your abilities so that when race day comes, you’re mentally able to roll with the punches.

Race Yourselves taps into that intrinsic motivation by providing visual references to your past performance that you can race in real-time.

But there’s more to it than that, Lutteroth adds. Race Yourselves also leverages the feedforward theory, which he describes as “seeing a version of yourself that can do something that you’re currently not able to do. But you see that it’s yourself, so you look at it as a future possibility.”

Whereas feedback occurs after the completion of an activity, feedforward input plants the seed of what is possible. “Life is always so much feedback, which usually means somebody’s telling you what not to do or what you’re doing wrong,” Lutteroth explains. And while that can be valuable and certainly has its place, he adds, “it can also be very demotivating and it doesn’t really tap into this intrinsic motivation, into this potential of having a model of yourself in the future of what you can achieve.”

For some athletes, a feedforward approach can be achieved through video editing. Lutteroth and his team explored this in a study published in 2023 that looks at how deep fake videos could help people learn to perform various tasks better.

“Seeing yourself do something is a powerful and motivating thing that can really improve your performance,” Lutteroth says.

For example, he notes that some Olympic-level divers watch edited videos that construct a perfect dive from all the perfect elements of previous dives they’ve done. In one dive, perhaps the angle of entry was just right, while in another, a somersault or a tuck was superlative. Extracting those bits of footage and stitching them together creates a video of a perfect dive, start to finish. Modeling that becomes somehow more attainable because the diver has already achieved it in pieces – they just need to put it all together in a single dive.

This concept has applications for everything from diving and dancing to public speaking and racing a bike. Lutteroth is eager to hear from athletes about what tools they’d like to see developed to help them better achieve their best performances. “If there are athletes or organizations or anyone, really, who’s interested in this, we’re very open to hearing from you,” he says.