If you’re at MassArt, you have to stop by the Wentworth gym (just across Huntington Ave.) and check this out: Expresso Fitness has cre­ated a sta­tion­ary bike with mov­ing han­dle­bars, a shifter, and, yes, a 3D graph­ics engine. And it is awesome.

By pro­vid­ing you with an on-screen avatar and over 50 courses to choose from, the Expresso sys­tem pre­vents your brain from acknowl­edg­ing the painful, bor­ing, phys­i­cal fact that you’re really just sit­ting in one place and ped­al­ing for 30-60 min­utes. You’re dis­tracted from any phys­i­cal sen­sa­tions when you real­ize that there are other peo­ple on the course with you (a gender-balanced and racially diverse crowd, as it turns out), and, as in a video game, you are moti­vated to beat them, to do bet­ter. So you start pass­ing your fel­low cyclists, even though you know that they’re not real, and they don’t care. You can lit­er­ally ride right through them, and they won’t even blink. Keep an eye on your pacer — he’s really the one to beat, as you’re ped­al­ing through Muir Woods, or an Aztec ruin, or even up in space.

If fake bicy­clists aren’t enough to moti­vate you, maybe real ones will. Like an old-school arcade, Expresso tracks each rider’s per­for­mance, pre­sent­ing a sort of high score list at the end of each ride. Did you beat Tommy M.? Ouch, looks like Jane S. tore through your best time! If you pro­vide the bike with your email address, it will notify you when other, real peo­ple beat your times. And of course you can log on to the web­site at any time (from home, not while on the bike) to track your progress, miles ped­aled, calo­ries burned, and so on. Since your motions are being recorded, you can also race your­self — your “ghost” — and improve your mad (sta­tion­ary bike) skillz.

This Internet-connected bike isn’t just mon­i­tor­ing you, though: it’s record­ing everyone’s rides, aggre­gat­ing the data, and gen­er­at­ing some inter­est­ing fac­toids. That’s how Expresso knows that peo­ple rid­ing its bikes ped­aled 1.4 mil­lion vir­tual miles, burn­ing 44 mil­lion calo­ries in September, as reported in the com­pany newslet­ter.

For a long time, gym­na­sia have been decid­edly low-tech places: think med­i­cine balls, stretch­ing mats, and free weights. But with tools like Wii Fit and Expresso bikes, our work­outs are going digital.