If anyone is interested, we're medically testing the calorie burn of the world's best Beat Saber players today, on the hardest modded songs, with the most intense difficulty to see what kind of exercise it is.
Last week we asked the community to suggest the highest intensity Expert+ songs for exercise, and wanted to post a quick update and announcement.
**Original Post w/ Song Discussion Here:**
[https://www.reddit.com/r/beatsaber/comments/9f4bny/best\_song\_maps\_for\_beat\_saber\_health\_experiment/](https://www.reddit.com/r/beatsaber/comments/9f4bny/best_song_maps_for_beat_saber_health_experiment/)
**What we're testing:**
1. What sort of calorie burn does an expert player experience on the world's toughest maps, on the highest settings? 2. How does this compare to a non-Expert+ player playing on Hard or standard Expert? 3. Is there an energy difference in the songs when playing on Vive vs. Rift? 4. How do different difficulties of the same song compare in terms of exercise? 5. Is there an energy difference between "wristy" stream song maps vs. full body play?
**Methods:**
We've recruited two top Beat Saber players (ranked #45 and #514 in the world) to play Beat Saber while connected to Cosmed and PNOE metabolic testing equipment, which measures the rate of oxygen conversion during play to calculate actual calorie consumption. Each player will complete a 30 minute set of Expert+ songs suggested by the modding community during testing, essentially completing the standard rating protocol from the VR Health ratings. One player will be completing the list using the Vive, and the other will be using a Rift, so we can compare the results (somewhat) across platforms. We will also have a more typical player play a series of non-Expert+ songs to serve as control. Finally, each player will play two songs selected to be stream-focused and "wristy" - meaning hard, but played with fast wrist movements over full body movements. In all cases players will be playing to achieve a high score on all songs.
**Our song list for the players is here:**
We solicited song suggestions from Reddit and the Beat Saber modding Discord community, and narrowed them down to songs that we felt represented intense Expert+ songs. You can find our song list and notes here (first tab is song list for testing, second tab the notes):[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/166NzBTM2FJ83hnCvXZ2jrHH9jrLI5Ocx7mf\_m949u0s/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/166NzBTM2FJ83hnCvXZ2jrHH9jrLI5Ocx7mf_m949u0s/edit?usp=sharing)
**Updates and Results:**
We're posting updates throughout the day with pictures and videos on Facebook ([https://www.facebook.com/vrhealthinstitute/](https://www.facebook.com/vrhealthinstitute/)) and Twitter ([https://twitter.com/VR\_Health\_In](https://twitter.com/VR_Health_In)), if you're interested. We won't be able to publish any data today, because it will take a bit to analyze. However, we'll be publishing the results on the VR Health Institute website ([http://vrhealth.institute](http://vrhealth.institute/)) over the next few weeks. We hope to collect data on the energy burn of the entire session, as well as for each individual song.
**When:**
We've started setup here at the lab, and will be collecting data from about noon through 5:00 p.m. today (Friday, 09/21/2018). We'll be posting periodic updates throughout.Thank you very much. :)
Aaron