Amputees train for balance in this awesome contraption that they are harnassed to. The little pod goes 360 degrees around and various real-life scenes are played on the surrounding screens-more realistic and effective than simply looking at a flat screen. The better they get at balancing, the less they rely on the harnass. THE TOUR GUIDE SAID: Simulation that you would not find in any other rehab center in the world. What this allows us to do, is to place the patient in virtual reality. Not with a head-mounted display, but actually immersed in the virtual reality. Like the Disneyland 360 movies where you can actually experience what it feels like to have the motion all the way around you. That’s what the patients do in here. The platform has six degrees of freedom, it has a treadmill and more importantly there are 24 infrared cameras and eight projectors to project a screen all the way around. We have the only simulator of this kind in the world and what that means is we have to do the research to back that up. By having it be bought by the American people and by the Intrepid fallen heroes fund, there’ll be some who say ‘look, where’s the proof that this works?’ They’ve got it and they are going to allow us to do that research to back it up. The other eight simulators in the world that are two-dimensional, basically with the platform and a flat screen have used it for testing and training but nobody’s bothered to do the evidence behind it and in this world in medicine we have to be evidence-based, right? This platform is so sophisticated that it can take (this balance stick—like a baton) and balance it without it moving. What that means is, these reflective markers are seen by the cameras which send a signal to the computer, which then sends a signal to the platform faster than a human can. What does that do for the patient? It’s inherently stable—the patient is not going to fall and we have them harnessed in anyway—but they can adjust to the changing terrain. They can adjust if we change the wave height on the boat scene and they have to use their balance to adjust to it. Then we can gradually take that ‘virtual crutch’ away from them. Then they can start moving the platform in relation to what they are seeing around them and they can become part of the video game. In the boat scene, they are controlling the platform. You are moving the boat, turning it left swerving it, turning it right, speeding up, walking forward, turning backward, slowing it down and avoiding the buoy in the lake and if you hit the buoy points are subtracted. It’s all after this generation’s love of simulation and games.

F-I-T synthesizes and collaborates with familiar satellite imagery technologies (ie, Google Earth) to create a virtual reality exercise experience. F-I-T will provide route making capabilities, real environment visuals, community formations, commerce opportunities, rewards, and many other individually customized entertainment venues that provide motivating reasons for any person to maintain a continuous and beneficial exercise regimen on stationary fitness equipment (treadmill, bike, elliptical, rowing machine, stair climber). F-I-T also merges outdoor and indoor exercise data and experiences.