From spinning to SoulCycle, the fitness world is full of attempts to turn the boring stationary bike into a thrilling way to exercise. To a startup company based in Cambridge, those kinds of classes are tinkering at the margins. As this company sees it, the real way to make stationary bikes exciting is to turn them into flying horses.

The company is VirZoom, and its product is an exercise bike that pairs with a virtual reality headset to turn pedaling-in-place into an exotic adventure. VirZoom’s CEO, Eric Janszen, says he first imagined the product 30 years ago during a gloomy winter workout.

“I was in the basement fitness room, [and] I closed my eyes and imagined myself pedaling through a wireframe tunnel. The faster you pedal, the faster you’d go through the tunnel,’’ he writes in an e-mail. “[It was a] very crude game, but conceptually the same kind of game VirZoom is creating now.’’

Three decades later, virtual reality technology has caught up with Janszen’s idea. This year, Oculus Rift and Sony will release the first mainstream virtual reality headsets. Already, software developers have created a raft of fitness games to go with them, like Runtastic, which provides users with a virtual personal trainer, and Race Yourself for Google Glass, that lets you race in a three-dimensional environment against a variety of virtual competitors, from a hurtling freight train to track star Usain Bolt.

There’s no reason, though, that exercise in a virtual world has to actually look like exercise. Rather than simulate a BMX course or allow users to sprint down the Champs-Élysées, the first games for VirZoom transform the stationary bicycle into something else entirely. Strap on a headset, and in one game the exercise bike is simulated as a Formula One race car — pedal faster, the car goes faster. In another, the bike becomes Pegasus, the winged horse; pedal fast enough and he takes off. Steering is done with the turn of your head.

“It’s not what you’d normally come to when combining VR and exercise,’’ says Janszen.

Neat as that might be, the human body knows instinctively that it’s not meant to function as the engine of a race car or fly through the air. An enduring problem with virtual reality experiences has been that they make people nauseous.

“The problem is if you’re moving through a VR world at 30 miles per hour, but you’re seated, the inner ear is confused, and it makes you feel sick,’’ Janszen says. “You can’t apply normal real world physics in VR, you can’t tilt horizontally rapidly, and if you turn your virtual body in a particular way, that will make you feel bad.’’

Janszen says that VirZoom has found ways to engineer these problems out of its games so that the whole experience feels “natural and intuitive.’’ The company is now accepting pre-orders for its bikes, which will cost $199.95, in addition to the expense of buying a virtual reality headset and a computer to run it all on.

The phenomenon of “exergaming’’ has been around for a while in two-dimensional form, with systems like the 1980s Nintendo Power Pad and, more recently, the Microsoft Kinect. A number of studies have established that these games motivate people to move more. Virtual reality games are still too new to evaluate, but there’s reason to believe they’ll encourage even greater fitness benefits.

Others aren’t convinced. “There is currently no evidence that can support the impact of VR on exercise performance,’’ writes Georgios Yannakakis, a professor at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, in an e-mail. He adds, though, “it is natural to assume that the enhanced user immersion offered by VR may lead to more intense physical activity and exercise’’ than is spurred by two-dimensional games.

If this turns out to be the case, it will be good news for companies like VirZoom and may also require us to revise the way we think of our science-fiction destiny. In most projections, addiction to virtual stimuli will lead to the withering of the human body. It would be a generous twist of fate if, instead, virtual reality turned us into better inhabitants of actual reality.

Kevin Hartnett is a writer in South Carolina. He can be reached at kshartnett18@gmail.com.