We used a Lode Excalibur Sport exercise bike and an FOVE HMD. They were connected to a PC running Unity with an Intel Xeon E5 2680 processor, 64 gigabytes of RAM, and two NVIDIA Titan X graphics cards. We measured blink rate in blinks per minute (Blinks) with the eye gaze tracker built into the FOVE HMD, recording pupillometry data with FOVE’s Unity plugin at 160Hz and counting blinks as periods with zero pupil diameter. We measured the tonic skin conductance (Conductivity) using the Shimmer3 Consensys GSR development kit in microsiemens (μS) at 128 Hz. Furthermore, we recorded the average power output (Power) in Watts during the sprint phases in conditions. For the II Experiment, in addition to recording Conductivity, Blinks and Power to determine affective state, we recorded the total time of eye gaze fixations (Fixations) on visual components of the game: the competitor, the gap between the player and the competitor, the points, prompts, the displayed RPM and the timer.

JASP statistics software (https://jasp-stats.org/) and the R programming language were used for data analysis. For the R scripts, we recommend using the RStudio IDE (https://rstudio.com/).