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Racing a Real Car While Wearing an Oculus VR Headset (wsj.com)
pbahra writes: In a race that fuses video-game technology and real world driving skill, two professional drivers, on two separate but identical tracks, have raced against each other — effectively blind — while wearing virtual reality headsets attached to their crash helmets. The drivers hurtled around the circuit in two identical 2015 V8 Ford Mustangs, trusting that what they were seeing on their Oculus Rift DK2 VR headsets was a true, real-time representation of how their cars were performing on the actual track. One of the main challenges: tracking the cars' exact positions as they sped around the track without the need for re-calibration. This was necessary so that an exact match could be achieved between what was happening on the physical track and its representation on the VR screens.
See, to me, this is bass-ackwards. The point of the autonomous automobile is to remove the driver from the equation of basic transportation, or to at least have the option to do so when one doesn't feel like driving.
This thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Generally the point in sport driving is to enjoy the drive itself, and to really connect with the machine where it feels like an extension of yourself. Removing that experience in order to simulate it in a 3d shell while still occupying the vehicle makes no sense to me. If you're in the vehicle you'll probably use your own eyes to operate it, or you'll use less expensive vision augmentation technology where your eyes are not adequate, and if you're not occupying the vehicle then you'll probably still get enough bandwidth out of video transmissions from cameras to allow you to operate without needing to encode the experience and then generate that 3d quasi-virtual environment.
I don't really understand what this particular technology is for.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I would call real-time, high speed driving relying entirely on the VR is fairly impressive in terms of the quality of the system.
If they can navigate a real car around the track, networking people into a simulation is probably much easier.
It's fairly cool, and involved a lot of technology. It may end up just being a PR stunt, but such technology has a way of having someone say "hey, wait a minute, if I had one of those, I could ..."
I should think being able to do this and have it work means you are tracking the real car and the VR car exceedingly well ... which suddenly means there's probably lots of places where remote operation becomes possible.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
See, to me, this is bass-ackwards. The point of the autonomous automobile is to remove the driver from the equation of basic transportation, or to at least have the option to do so when one doesn't feel like driving.
Unrelated to TFA and your point about sport driving (which I agree with completely), the current goal of autonomous vehicles is backwards imo. Rather than shoot for sensationalism (full autonomy), they should be going for things augmenting driver abilities. Lane assist, brake assist, adaptive cruise control, traction control, active stability system, etc. As you integrate those technologies and give them more and more control over the car, what you'd end up with then is a car that basically is driving itself but with the "driver" making the decisions. Twitch the wheel and the car automatically signals, checks its blind spot, then moves over a lane if safe, at which point the driver goes back to reading the morning news as the adaptive cruise maintains safe following distance (pair the system up with a tablet and it could overlay lane status so the "driver" maintains some degree of situational awareness as fed to them by the car). The car could even alter driving modes based on current circumstances, e.g. upon exiting the freeway, the driver is given full manual control until they enter a parking lot and attempt to pull into a space, at which point the car detects it and offers to take over.
Possibly not the same result. The VR headset only supplies visual information, and possibly auditory information as well. In driving -- especially racecar driving -- the tactile and proprioperceptive (i.e. acceleration) data inputs play a big role. If they had a remote driver, it's more likely there would have been problems. Or at least, the drivers wouldn't have driven exactly the same way, since they would be driving "blind" in a more profound sense than the summary implies.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Sounds interesting.
Would be great if they said:
- how it worked
- did it work?
- what speeds did they achieve
- driver's opinions
- surprises?
- how did they cope with in-race obstacles? Could they just drive over them?
- same with the other car, a HUGE part of racing is positioning...in this could they just drive through the other car?
BUT THEY DON'T
Worthless fucking promo video.
-Styopa