This enthusiast video which uses green screen video capture to fuse virtual reality footage, demonstrates how impressively accurate VR racing games are becoming.
The trend set by the excellent mixed reality videos from Northway Games, showcasing their excellent room-scale title Fantastic Contraption, continued last week with Valve adopting similar techniques to convey the power of the HTC Vive VR system.
This new video, produced by racing enthusiast Marcel Pfister, uses a green screen technique to mask off the real world, save for his arms and steering wheel, then mesh video capture from the sim racing title Assetto Corsa with headset mounted camera footage.
The results are an impressive demonstration of the Oculus Rift’s tracking accuracy and how close the AC’s representation of real life racing is right now – with the physical and virtual worlds closely aligned in motion.
Assetto Corsa (which means “Racing Setup” in Italian) has included preliminary virtual reality support for some time, with Oculus Rift DK1 support added back in 2013. Recently however, the title’s VR support seems to have stalled, with the developer stating development focus efforts have been focused elsewhere just now:
“Although the retail version of Oculus Rift is finally available, at the moment our core team is focused on the submission and release of Assetto Corsa for consoles…”
However, the desire seems still to be there to bring AC to the recently released Oculus Rift consumer edition:
“Our aim is to support VR – and not necessarily only the Oculus Rift – when we will be able to take the time and resources required.
We fully understand that people who have invested in the purchase of a VR device want to use it as much as possible, and we know that Assetto Corsa guaranteed a ton of fun with the Oculus SDK2 (that could only be better with the retail version), therefore we promise that we will take the time to evaluate the option of creating proper VR support in harmony with other tasks and priorities that we have already scheduled.”
Mixed reality techniques are proving to be a powerful way to illustrate to the uninitiated just how effective and immersive virtual reality can be, something that is tricky to pull off via traditional marketing methods. We’re all for it.