The airfield is so slippery that it takes a full brake stomp to pull it down from 140km/h to make the tight hairpin at the top of the circuit, and then we’re flicking left to right to make the “windows” before the full-throttle crossover part of the figure-of-eight.Īnd then we pull up in the box, check the time and take off the headset, somewhat in shock that this whole thing, actually, works. Sighter lap done, and we attack the next lap from the start, with full wheelspin that, actually, feels like an M2 with full wheelspin, and it whips through the quicker bends, dinging the coins into the virtual wallet more rapidly now. They move around and the more you collect, like in so many games before it, the more seconds you slash off your lap time.īMW combines this with a series of barrier gates, and one of them flashes red at the last instant, forcing you to flick the M2 into the other one, even as you prepare the car for the bends. The ripple strips are, actually, so much there that nobody dares try out the armco barriers. You feel them through the steering wheel and the suspension. It’s close enough that the nausea-inducing parts of your brain don’t notice the difference. Given that this is very much a “damage on” game, we ease out on our first lap, and it’s already amazing.Įvery time you tilt your head, the game reacts and the vision reacts, within milliseconds.
It’s another leap of faith to expect the elongated figure-eight track to keep you on the actual airfield tarmac, but BMW assures me it has all been mapped accurately. It’s a leap of faith to expect the lit-up racetrack in front of you, complete with red-and-white ripple strips and armco, to be there when you get there. Besides, the engineer in the passenger seat has a large emergency brake pedal. It's a leap of faith to hit 90mph with a VR headset on, but the BMW M Mixed Reality is so accurate. The hardware is wired into the car, so all the driver’s own inputs become the game’s inputs.Īnd just like that, the headset is switched on and the daytime scene at a cold German airfield becomes night time in what looks like a Japanese city.Įverywhere you look, there is the perfect simulation of a neon-rich city full of skyscrapers and bridges, and my co-driver (who has his own emergency brake pedal, and no VR headset) tells me to move in to the start gate.Īnd there is an actual start gate, which is geofenced, with the display showing precisely where to go, and then it gives a countdown and he tells me to attack a timed lap. The hardware is a Art Smarttrack system attached by suction cups to the windscreen, with stereo cameras to track the driver’s head movement, combined with a seven-camera Art Vix R3T3 VR headset. head movements, and translates that into images for the VR headset. The BMW M Mixed Reality hardware utilises a smart track system to precisely measure the driver's.
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