Two WOW players use treadmills to run around Azeroth, almost suffer heart attack

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Apparently mice and keyboard controls just aren’t immersive enough for some people, as evidenced by the two guys in the above video. They show off the treadmills they’ve rigged up to control character movement in World of Warcraft, and for some reason they also decided it would be a good idea to cosplay as female Night Elves while doing so. Don’t ask me why.

Elijah and Aaron start off in Shadowglen and race to nearby Darnassus. Elijah narrowly won with a time of four minutes and fifty seconds. The two of them look pretty damn tired afterwards; maybe they should have used a more rigorous training regimen.

Once he’s able to breathe normally again, Aaron goes over how the treadmill controllers work: a mouse tracks a pad on a bicycle wheel that is spun by the treadmill. A scripting program then converts this movement into ‘W’ pulses, resulting in forward movement. He also mentions that while a WoW character has a running speed of 12 mph, they only needed to maintain a speed of 6 mph to get their Night Elves running. I guess a 1:1 pace was just too much for them to maintain.

Do you think a movement scheme like this could be a good way for some gamers to shed extra pounds?