“Have we seen the Icaros?” I asked my editor Thomas Ricker on Slack this morning. “It's like a weird VR flying frame.”

“We did something. Not sure it was this,” he said.

There was a time when VR peripherals were so singular that each one opened up some totally new sensorial frontier. This morning, I had to rack my brain to remember precisely which virtual reality flying machines people had already seen this week. The answer turned out to be the Hypersuit, which looks much like the Icaros, but has a fan.

Specialized VR hardware is starting to feel a lot like exercise equipment

Maybe this doesn’t sound like the most upbeat beginning to a gadget story, but I don’t actually think it’s a bad thing. Specialized VR hardware is starting to feel a lot like exercise equipment, and the more of it people make, the more likely you’ll be able to get your morning workout in the form of virtual reality skydiving.

The $8,000 Icaros was first announced in 2015, and it went on sale last year, but I hadn’t gotten to try it until today — and the feeling isn’t unpleasant. Icaros is a straightforward frame with pegs for your hands and feet, and pads for your knees and elbows. After you adjust it to fit, you stretch out, put on a mobile or tethered headset, and start soaring far above some rugged mountaintops. Instead of trying to flap or turn “wings” like in Birdly — yet another weird VR flying frame — you change direction by shifting your weight around the frame.

Icaros is a bit difficult to get used to, and it looks very silly. Using it may not exactly bind you with muscle, although it might improve your coordination. But it’s fairly comfortable, intuitive, and fun — like sci-fi gym gear of the future. There’s a real feeling of skill involved, even after only playing for a few minutes. And fortunately, despite what its name suggests, it is impossible to fly too near the sun.