Pedaling Virtual Reality Biking : Fitness industry: Irvine firm’s machine lets riders escape boredom without leaving the gym.

Tired of facing another lap on the treadmill or another bicycle ride to nowhere? Got 10 minutes to go and you can’t wait for this workout to end?

Boredom, not self-inflicted torture, is the No. 1 reason most health club members quit after three to six months, and the industry is constantly trying to come up with new gimmicks to keep the customers.

Now Tectrix Fitness Equipment, an exercise equipment maker in Irvine, thinks that it has an answer. Judging from the response its newest machine received at last week’s annual Club Industry Show in Chicago, it may be right.

Lines of fitness experts and other potential customers at the three-day event jammed the 18 Tectrix VR Bikes on display, waiting to take a spin through hillsides, down ski jumps, along city streets and inside buildings--all on a stationary bicycle in an artificial, or virtual, world.

Those riding the VR Bike--a combo state-of-the-art exercise machine and the latest virtual reality software--bobbed and weaved, leaned sideways and forward, grimaced and laughed. In short, they acted very much as they might have had they been actually riding a bicycle outside.

“It’s quite an exciting piece of equipment,” said Mike McNeese, general manager of the Sporting Club at Lakeshore Towers in Irvine. “It was easily the top one or two most popular pieces at the trade show.”

The recumbent bike, created with software maker CyberGear Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., is the first exercise machine to combine the equipment with complete virtual reality software and a synchronized sound system. No other manufacturer has anything resembling it, said fitness experts.

“It’s as close to reality as possible without leaving the club,” McNeese said.

The machine has a 20-inch color monitor hooked up to it less than a yard away from the face of the rider, who can become quickly engrossed in directing the action on the screen. The rider can pedal through 440 acres of rural landscape and city streets in a make-believe New England setting, cycling on roads or grassy slopes while avoiding trees and other obstacles.

Groups of as many as eight bikers can be connected to travel together casually or to compete against one another in races, watching as each rider comes onto the screens of fellow riders and feeling the bumps of the road and the nudges of other riders. Riders also can compete against robobikers--similar to playing chess against a computer.

The machine’s seat adjusts so cyclists can shift their weight to turn left or right. Thumb controls allow cyclists to shift gears, stop, view the surrounding area or get a map of their virtual world. A cool breeze from fans enclosed in the fronts of the bikes blows in riders’ faces and stereo speakers provide soft music and sounds of wind and passing trucks.

Pedaling resistance increases when going up steep terrain. Riders can coast downhill and unexpectedly find themselves on a ski slope that sends them high into the air and down through trees onto the hillside. If a biker hits a tree, the collision can be heard on the speakers and felt in the pedals at the same time.

Luckily, riders don’t have to worry about injuries, except for pulled muscles, perhaps. While the bike halts when it hits a tree, it never falls.

It can take three hours or more to see almost everything in the virtual reality program, and then riders will have missed surprises hidden in pathways and hillsides.

McNeese said he’ll order a VR Bike for his club and is prepared to buy two or three more. He said that any club that pays $7,495 for one--about $1,500 more than the industry’s most expensive treadmill--should budget enough money to buy a few more because members will be waiting in long lines in front of the lone VR Bike and demanding more.

At such a high price, the bike was not designed for retail sale, though Tectrix and other exercise machine makers have been more active recently in selling equipment to consumers. The long secret project was always aimed for health clubs, said Steven Russell, Tectrix’s executive vice president for sales and marketing.

“But consumer demand for the product (from the show) was so strong that we’ll have to ration some of them for retail,” Russell said. “We’re nearly sold out of our production capacity for the rest of this year.”

Shipping started this week, he said.

The VR Bike is expected to spur the company’s sales next year beyond the 50% growth rate that it achieved this year, Russell said. The privately held company, which makes the ClimbMax brand of stair climber and the BikeMax exercise cycle, should have sales of $30 million this year, he said. It sold $20 million worth of exercise equipment last year.

Tectrix, founded in 1988, said it is now the second-largest manufacturer of stair climbers for commercial use in health clubs, controlling 20% of that market.

This month the company placed 17th on Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing privately held companies.

“We just created a new category of fitness equipment, and there’s nobody in it but us,” Russell said. He figured it might take at least a year before another company can match the VR Bike, and, by then, he promised, Tectrix will be working on a new generation of virtual reality machines and adding to its current stock.

In February, CyberGear, which uses CD-ROM to display the New England countryside, will be coming out with another read-only disc for the VR Bike, this one of a Caribbean island. Russell said cyclists will be able to go up a volcano and into the crater, and when they ride into the water, the bike becomes a pedal-powered submarine that can chase fish and weave through underwater caves.

Tectrix and CyberGear also are working on a virtual reality stair climber that they hope to start producing late next year, he said, and one more product, which he declined to identify, is on the drawing board.

“People perceive that exercise is boring, but we’ve turned that premise upside down,” Russell said. “We’ve made it honest-to-God fun. Instead of checking their watches to see that they still have 10 minutes to go, they get off the VR Bikes after 30 minutes and wonder where the time has gone.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.