Racing a Real Car While Wearing an Oculus VR Headset (wsj.com) 74
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.
Real Men (Score:1)
Real Men wouldn't have been on separate tracks.
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Some say, Ben Collin's memoir cost him a position on a popular British TV motoring show.
All we know is, he was called the Stig.
And since Stigs are not humans, your comment does not apply.
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They could have, but that's what they normally do, so what's the fun in that.
This was an engineering challenge, in terms of latency in particular, and I bet it was fun for the drivers too to have the CGI racetrack.
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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 t
Re:A positive step (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The only kinds of places that I can think of that we can't put cameras into and expect them to reliably work are in underwater applications and in extremely harsh post-accident environments like nuclear power plants that have suffered catastrophic failures. Anything beyond these terrestrial applications isn't going to work with this technology because of the latency (ie, can't virtually drive a Martian rover) and while there are submarines and robots for ex
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Then why are the drivers inside of the vehicle?
Because the sponsors are castrol? [see the placement at about 1:15 -- seems they are pouring castrol into the simulator car which is anyway standstill]. May be if it were a tech company, the drivers will be in a data-center kind of environment.
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Racing without Safety Rules (Score:2)
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You'd probably have too many crashes. Even without a life-loss incident you'd have a lot of expensive machinery wrecked. Granted, you could not no longer design cars with the occupant's safety in mind, but even without having to spend the money on that aspect the cars are still very expensive to build. Losing them due to operators pushing the cars past the point of stability would be pricey.
I don't see cost being a prohibitive factor. Look at battle bots...... What is being described is very similar - and while the primary purpose might not be destruction, having more of it won't scare the viewers (or sponsors) away, and with enough sponsors, you can burn the stadium to the ground as a finale and still cover costs.
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I still wonder what it's actually for...
Entertainment is always an option, even if nothing else comes out of it. Just imagine playing something like Battlefield YOURSELF, like in paintball style, but wearing VR glasses instead of a protective mask. All of the needed ingredients seem to be maturing, like VR displays and cameras, motion control, etc. I can almost see myself moving to Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat's Al Nas or Lost Village... I could finally get off the damn chair!
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I still wonder what it's actually for...
Entertainment is always an option, even if nothing else comes out of it. Just imagine playing something like Battlefield YOURSELF, like in paintball style, but wearing VR glasses instead of a protective mask. All of the needed ingredients seem to be maturing, like VR displays and cameras, motion control, etc. I can almost see myself moving to Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat's Al Nas or Lost Village... I could finally get off the damn chair!
This.
The headset merely replaces the real boring visuals with CG, so instead of seeing your green paintball explode on your mate's pokemon tshirt instead you see a bullet explode through their high tech chest armour, emblazoned with their team's emblem, and if they get up again afterwards and try to shoot you, it won't matter so much, aside for the paintball impact, they'll still appear dead to you and you can continue playing. They've already got a few places experimenting with this sort of thing (One in
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Then why are the drivers inside of the vehicle?
1. No FBW steering or braking.
2. Non-visual senses such as acceleration and sound are very important to performance, especially on a racetrack.
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Then why are the drivers inside of the vehicle?
The only kinds of places that I can think of...underwater applications...nuclear...failures...the applications for those environments are usually based on slow, methodical processes, not on fast-twitch reactions....Admittedly if the technology to make the interface work in real-time is actually working then that's pretty neat, but at the same time I still wonder what it's actually for.
The military has already been researching and investing in similar technology for vehicles with limited views and/or armoring, like tanks, trucks, helicopters, planes, etc. Transferring this tech to entertainment applications was already stated.
Re:A positive step (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
...they should be going for things augmenting driver abilities. Lane assist, brake assist, adaptive cruise control, traction control, active stability system, etc...
Which one of those aren't implemented yet?
As for the rest of your point, I disagree inherently. I don't trust people to be smart enough to know when they should "Twitch the wheel" and then go back to reading the news. I know too many people who can't even tell they haven't hung their phone up for me to be able to trust that they've let the system properly take control.
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I would love to have a car capable of sport-driving that could also be fully autonomous. Sometimes I want to enjoy the drive, other times I want to enjoy the view.
I feel like those two things are mutually exclusive (depending on your definition of sport-driving). All of the things required for a sporty car (small, lightweight, lots of internal bracing, good balance, as much power from as little engine as possible) conflict with all of the space and weight considerations of the sensors/electronics/actuators that would be required to make something fully autonomous.
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Which one of those aren't implemented yet?
They are implemented, that's the point. What I'm saying to do is implement them more. e.g. lane assist generally just beeps at you or vibrates the wheel on the side you're drifting. The next step would be for it to actually control the steering unless you explicitly override it. Blind spot detection also just beeps at you if you signal and/or drift lanes while there's something there. The enhanced version just flat out wouldn't let you do it.
As for the rest of your point, I disagree inherently. I don't trust people to be smart enough to know when they should "Twitch the wheel" and then go back to reading the news. I know too many people who can't even tell they haven't hung their phone up for me to be able to trust that they've let the system properly take control.
Yet you trust that they'd let a self driving car take control? (as
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They are implemented, that's the point. What I'm saying to do is implement them more.
Let me guess: You're some kind of well-paid manager somewhere.
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Take your ABS-equipped vehicle out in the snow. Go fast. Stomp on the brakes. The car just refused to perform an operation - it did not lock the brakes when you told it to. It did not apply the full force of the brakes as instructed.
For the record, being able to disable ABS for certain driving styles would be enjoyable for me but I'm glad that people have access to them.
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You *cannot* refuse to perform a commanded operation when the driver is in control of the vehicle.
Yes you can. ABS refuses to stop if it senses the wheels locking up. Traction control refuses to give full power to a wheel if it senses slippage. There's no reason that the blind spot detector can't refuse to let you switch lanes if it detects a motorcycle there.
And if flat out refusing the command has you worried (in which case, why don't fully autonomous cars also have you worried?), it could just provide the refusal as making the steering wheel hard to turn in that direction rather than flat out loc
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Everything is being Recorded. (Score:2)
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Everything is being Recorded --- that's the point. There will also be driver-less ("A.I." only) Nascar races. The data from these kinds of experiments is going to be extremely valuable. I would lay odds on Nascar being completely driver-less --- as far as having a physical driver in the car within the foreseeable future.
NASCAR fans are all about the drivers. Some fans do care about branding, but the cars all originate from a handful of chassis builders anyway, so branding is limited to stickers and drivetrains. It becomes about the driver and their role in winning, or who's the villain, or who's the beacon of clean driving.
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90% of my driving is not especially enjoyable. Being stuck in traffic or driving for hours at constant speed on straight lines while still needing to maintain attention is not my idea of fun.
And the remaining 10% are not pure bliss either. The public road is not a toy, and if you "enjoy" it too much, cops will remind you about the rules, or worse.
And if I am on the track, there is no way I want any VR stuff. If I pay good money for the real deal, this is not to get some glorified video game.
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I am much more interested in this kind of thing than in Google's nonsense with self-driving cars. I understand Google is paving the way for improved versions of Tesla's autopilot so it is great to see, but as far as personal enjoyment of driving an augmented-reality experience will be the future and bring great benefits.
Yeah, it's great to see the driving experience being augmented for a change, instead of being dumbed down, which seems to be the norm these days. Still, I can see a lot of value in self-driving cars, even for private use, under certain circumstances or for some people.
Who says it's virtual? (Score:2)
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Nobody sees reality. Everybody "sees" the light that is reflected by objects, as perceived by the eye and interpreted by the brain. You could say what we see is a three-level abstraction of reality. And in this way we see only a tiny bubble of the things that reflect enough of the right light to be perceived by our eyes, that are unoccluded, and in our field of view. So reality is filtered three times before we are allowed to see it. Then of course we are limited to see the things sharing the same tiny bubb
Huh? (Score:2)
How do you do that? I should think building a second track which is identical to the first would be a hell of a feat.
All it would take it relatively small differences in the track and it's going to make a huge difference.
I've never heard of such a thing, any civil engineers who could tell us how hard it is to have two identical race tracks? I just can't see it being easy to get the same grading and all that in two separate places.
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If you look at the video they just setup some cones on some dirt to make a "racetrack".
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We all know that Separate but equal isn't.
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They laid the 'track' out with cones. When you have VR, you don't need walls :)
Min
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Well, I was thinking more in terms of grading and slope of places which would affect the driving.
But if they're both just on a flat track, then it's less of a deal.
I was just picturing trying to simulate something like the famous corkscrew turn at Laguna Seca -- and there's no way in hell you can simulate that on a track laid out with cones.
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A flat track with the same predictable surface everywhere too so you don't have to read it all the time.
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Sounds like a mix of quotes from The Matrix and Back to the Future:
VR means fasten your seat belt Dorothy, 'cause where we're going, we don't need roads.
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We ran into this issue while programming networked simulators for the USAF. When you have two simulators interacting with each other, you can't just spam position updates as fast as you can. You'll quickly saturate the network bandwidth if you do. Consequently, you have to rely on le
don't give my son any ideas (Score:2)
How to mess with a driver (Score:2)
Use The Force, Luke.
Let go.
Luke, trust me.
Already done - but not with a car (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
They also had the same problem of tracking the car exactly as they found that even the difference between front and back seats would cause nausea.
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switching between virtual view and real coaster. Probably can't brin those two sensations into a video in a more coherent way, but here is the manufacturers homepage.
http://www.vrcoaster.com/index... [vrcoaster.com]
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How much does your neck hate you after riding a roller coaster with that thing on your head?
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No idea. but I rode that coaster when I was a kid. It's rather tame . That's how they had the idea to buff it up. Bunch of cellphones was cheaper than tearing it down :-)
HUD Display System (Score:2)
Actually this technology if it could be implemented reliably could be very useful. Imagine if you could have a full heads up display where there's no blind spots coupled with self-driving technology to alert you visibly on the screen if you were about to slam into another object or point out potholes, ect with driving guidance. I imagine the military might want something like this as well as the windows usually arn't as well armoured as the vehicle itself or there's a tonne of blind spots in an actual tan
Utterly worthless - the article (Score:4, Interesting)
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.