Castrol has developed one of the craziest applications of virtual reality to date, which involves a race car driver strapped with an Oculus Rift in the head while he burns rubber in a souped Mustang across a parking lot -- and it's all in the name of selling a fancy new oil called Titaniun Strong.
As part of Castrol's Titanium Trials series of high-powered driving challenges to promote its high-performance motor oil, the company decided there is no better time to take on virtual reality than now.
With Ben Conrad, creative lead of "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," as director, Castrol released Titanium Strong Virtual Drift, showcasing Formula Drift driver Matt Powers burning rubber as he races in a virtual apocalyptic world swerving around falling rocks and away from crumbling cliffs seen through the Oculus Rift DK2 attached to his helmet. In the real world, however, Powers sees nothing as he drifts through a parking lot while the his virtual vision continues to respond to the movements made by him and the Roush Stage 3 Mustang he drives.
It may look like it's just a bunch of special effects to the untrained eye, but the stunt, which Castrol thought up last year and began filming in February, actually took a lot of hard work. The biggest problem they had to contend with is the loss of location accuracy that happens to people when they move out of their initial location when wearing an Oculus Rift. Driving a car makes it even worse.
To address this issue, Castrol brought in creative technologists Glenn Snyder and Adam Amaral, whose work is featured in films such as "Transformers" and "Star Wars."
"It was definitely disorienting," Powers says. "The first time I did it, Adam was in the passenger seat looking down at his computer, and I was in the mask. I'm following the course as I see it [in VR], going five mph. When we finished, he looks up and I take off the mask and we're 20 feet away from where we started. We were so shocked. This is all we traveled? It felt like we were five blocks away."
What Snyder and Amaral did was essentially to turn the car into one big game controller. Inside the car's trunk is a custom-built server using NVIDIA GTX 980 video cards that syncs the Oculus Rift with a smattering of sensors to extract specific data, such as steering, throttling, brake and orientation, to calculate where Powers is likely to head in the virtual world. The calculations aren't perfect though, and Powers will likely drift a feet or two from where he's supposed to be in the real world. For the two-minute video, that's fine, but Snyder says "it wouldn't have been sustainable for a few minutes."
Check out Castrol's Virtual Drift video below.
To give viewers a better idea of what goes on inside the virtual world from the point of view of Powers, while slipping in and out of virtual reality throughout the race, watch the video below.
