As we prepare once again for the annual relentless onslaught of TV commercials hawking virtual reality gaming headsets, it is high time for you to once again wonder whether these things are good for anything other than a mildly amusing, very expensive party trick. Good news: This holiday season, in lieu of using a headset to dodge invisible enemies bent on your destruction while careening around your real-life living room and running repeatedly into real-life hardwood furniture, you can use these goggles to make a dent in the unconscionable volume of Christmas cookies you ingested at the company holiday party. You have to play video games now, you see. For fitness.

An outfit called VirZOOM—a caps lock-friendly portmanteau with origins that will become apparent shortly—manufactures a family of gadgets designed to integrate virtual reality gaming into one's use of an exercise bike. The premise is simple: As your pedaling goes, so does your character in whichever of their games you elect to play. VirZOOM's proprietary bike, which builds gaming controls directly into the handlebars, has been on the market for over a year, but at $399, it's a hell of an investment for a hyperspecialized piece of equipment that also requires the purchase of a VR headset and smartphone (or computer), and that requires you to keep an exercise bike in your house.

This fall, though, the company is rolling out the $99 VZ Sensor, a matchbox-size plastic square that straps to any exercise bike—whatever your gym has will work just fine—and transforms it into a whimsical exercise machine-gaming system hybrid. After launching the associated app and pulling the headset on as normal, the Sensor automatically... well, senses your VR system with a bit of gentle pedaling. From there, you enter the VirZoom arcade, where you select a game (or a rotation between several games) to play during your workout.

As you might guess, many of the available options are races of some kind—you can pick from several flavors of vehicles, and a Tour de France-style road biking competition—but there are also some that try a bit more to separate what you do in the game from your real-life huffing and puffing. You can engage in tank warfare, or dodge missiles while piloting a helicopter down a river, or even collect gems while flying a Pegasus through a magical, vibrantly-colored kingdom. (Yes, this thing would be wild to use under the influence of mind-altering substances.) My personal favorite, though, involved chasing down escaping outlaws on horseback as an Old West sheriff, deftly separating them from their stolen steeds before they could escape the range of my trusty lasso.

Although I assumed going in to this test that it would be a bemusing-but-ultimately-silly novelty, it's... admittedly pretty fun! I ended up tracking down bandits for a solid 20 minutes longer than I intended to, which is, I suppose, exactly the point. All pieces of cardio exercise equipment are, at their core, horrible human hamster wheels, and this little contraption is one of the few things I've tried that actually made the experience marginally less miserable. The only real drawback was that the interior of the leather-rimmed headset eventually got a little steamy, so be prepared for the occasional stinging drop of sweat to interrupt your attempts to bring virtual lawlessness to heel.

"I ended up tracking down bandits for a solid 20 minutes longer than I intended to, which is, I suppose, exactly the point."

I don't know that the VZ Sensor is the kind of thing that should make you immediately cop a new phone and VR headset if you don't already own those things. (Also, while it's great that you can bring the set-up into the gym, I don't know if you want to be the guy on the bike wearing Cyclopsian goggles, waving your head around and grunting in frustration every time an enemy helicopter deftly evades your fire.) If you already have those things, though, and you either have a bike at home or otherwise don't mind being stared at, the VZ Sensor is fun enough to make you exercise a bit more often, and cheap enough that you won't be heartbroken if you decide that VR exercise isn't for you. Please remember, though, that it is to be used on stationary bikes only. The real-life trees out there can be very unforgiving.

Watch Now:Allyson Felix Tries Her Hand at 'QWOP'Jay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read more