I’m sure you have seen them; exercise machines with TV monitors placed on them so you can watch TV while exercising. And that is fine enough, but I do not like gyms that much and watching TV disconnects me from my workout. What I really want is to play a game while doing my workout.. And now we have it.
Bitgym is this little startup that is taking a simple idea and putting it in place. The app uses the camera on the ipad2, and iphone4s, to track your head position. It uses the accelerometers to track vibration patters to determine your speed. With these two inputs, it lets you play a racing game or do a city tour if you do not have an ipad1 or older iphone.  The app should be out by early Dec.
When I first saw this, they were targeting this for exercise machines, but I thought, there is no reason why this should not work for bikes on a exercise stand. So I brought my stand to the shooting for another article I was working on for VentureBeat and we decided to try this out. And it works! Yes, there needs to be a bit of tuning, but it mostly works right out of the box.
** I will post pics and video in a bit **
The demo app is free, so all you need is a simple bike stand (get a used one for a few bucks) and an ipad or iphone mount and thats it! So heck, anything should work right? Why not put it on a big wheel? Should work, right?

Here is a clip from the Video we are going to release on the Venturebeat site when the app goes live, so consider this a sneak preview. 😉