Hey guys this is Austin and today I’m here
in Southern California to find out how real
is VR? Castrol EDGE motor oil invited me out
to the set of their latest project at this
closed military base. A real driver will be
racing a real car in a completely virtual
world. He’s going to be using an Oculus
Rift headset which will make him totally blind
to the real world. So the cool thing is this
is a project, it’s not a commercial. All
of this tech that Castrol EDGE has designed
is actually real. It’s all about Castrol
EDGE taking technology and driving to the
limit. To get an idea of what riding in the
car is going to be like I first got a chance
to check out the tech behind it all. So here
is the helmet with the Oculus Rift DK2 built
in so let’s give it a try. The helmet itself
looks straight out of Daft Punk but inside
it’s all about the Oculus. I couldn’t
drive the car with the helmet on which I can’t
say was a huge letdown but I could still try
the experience seated. Being able to see a
virtual version of the interior of the car
while actually being in the car was surprisingly
cool. Putting the tech side of this together
are Adam and Glenn. These guys went all out,
they built a solution to read the inputs from
the car like steering and throttle, got the
RTK positioning to track the car and even
put together a monster i7-5960X and GTX 980
rig that fits in the backseat. So when did
you actually find out that you’re good,
you didn’t have to like tear the whole thing
down, hey guys actually this doesn’t work.
Honestly? Day before yesterday. That’s the
right answer! So we kind of go into like a
tandem battle in the mask with another car
and then I drift right and then all of a sudden
the ground is like there’s a huge cliff
end so I stop then in front of me the cliff
is falling away so I go in reverse and I do
a reverse 180 into a right hand turn. So sick.
And that feels really cool because you’re
like this. Just spin it around! So it’s
the very end of the day and I finally get
to drive inside the car with the Oculus helmet
on so pretty excited, just a little bit.
Yeah!
We’re flying now!
Oh dude, oh man, this is so cool! This is
so cool, I’m all over the place man!
So I just did the ride along and that is completely
insane. Being able to like sit in the passenger
seat, first of all I wasn’t driving so like
I didn’t have any control over where I was
going. But then being able to just fly down
and spin and stuff it’s, it’s unbelievable
how like, I, I don’t even know what to say
right now that is one of the coolest experiences
I have ever had, wow. This video started with
a question about how real is VR. Think about
this for a minute. You’ve got an Oculus
Rift connected to a monster computer inside
a 600 plus horsepower Roush Mustang that is
tracked with millimeter precision and all
of the data is being fed into a game engine
that’s running in real time. It would have
been the easiest thing ever to just fake it
to make a commercial but instead Castrol made
the coolest virtual reality setup I’ve ever
experienced. If a pro driver can drift completely
blind to the real world using VR, I’d say
the future is looking pretty bright. Definitely
be sure to check out the full video on their
channel to see how this all came together.
