The problem with running on a treadmill is that you aren't going anywhere. You're just staying in one place the entire time without making any visible progress, and it can get quite boring.
To simulate forward movement on the treadmill, you could print a really long (that is, really wide) life-size picture of a coastline, or just the side of a highway or road. After rolling this picture up in a scroll, you could stand the scroll up next to the treadmill and rig it so that as you run, through gear action, the spinning of the treadmill spools in one side of the scroll and unfurls the other. This would create the illusion of movement as you run and the image moves past you at the same speed as your gait. Alternatively, you could have the scroll unfurl backwards in the opposite direction, and pretend to moon-walk the entire way.
Scrolls of different "trips" could be printed and sold; both realistic speeds and hyper-compressed pictures of cross-country road trips to be completed in half an hour. You could either jog leisurely down a country road or sprint at super-speed from Beijing to Vienna, all during the course of one workout.-- DrWorm, Apr 13 2010 or something a bit fancier like this http://www.techchee...r-scenes-280708.jpg [victor, Apr 14 2010] needs a fan, a tilting mechanism, audio, a smell generator... Why not put it on an LED screen instead? I know! just make the whole treadmill a ball that moves around on rollers with LED screens on all sides and AC vents and you running inside like a hamster ball-- Voice, Apr 13 2010 you could have a large circular treadmill along the outside of a gym, where the track rotates all the time.-- FlyingToaster, Apr 13 2010 Or you could put the scroll in front of the treadmill - you run forwards but the scroll scrolls sideways. That'd be interesting.-- phundug, Apr 13 2010 Maybe, but that's not the same thing, or even close; this is for personal fitness, not filming chase scenes (although you could...).-- DrWorm, Apr 13 2010 Here's deja vu all over again. Listen up, [Quest], and I'll put it in ALL CAPS for you. This is a NEW IDEA. It serves a DIFFERENT PURPOSE from the moving backdrops used in film sets. It's used IN THE HOME, not on a studio backdrop, and most importantly, IT ISN'T JUST A SMALLER VERSION. If anything, the idea is for the printing of moving images to be sold seperately and attached to treadmills. So NO, THIS DOES NOT ALREADY EXIST and, in my humble opinion, it is a valid idea that doesn't deserve to get picked apart like the boy in "12 Angry Men".
Whew. Well, I've said my piece. I dunno, [Quest], sometimes your comments just bring out the worst in me.
Afterthought: Just because something already physically exists doesn't mean that repurposing it isn't an original idea. Whoever decided to run on a conveyor belt in the first place could tell you that.-- DrWorm, Apr 14 2010 ...or you could have a treadmill which uses energy from your running to power a motor and wheels underneath, so that you can take it outside and have the treadmill travel along a road or path in the countryside as you run on it.-- hippo, Apr 14 2010 Using perspective, you could print out a "life-size" image that's only five feet tall. And also, it's not that I can't take criticism. I just hate being discredited whenever I post something with the tiniest resemblance to a preexisting item.
[hippo], I'm pretty sure that that has been suggested here, and it may even have been built.-- DrWorm, Apr 14 2010 random, halfbakery