BMW just helped create its own Metaverse, so to speak, that’s infinitely more interesting and exciting than just playing Sims with your Facebook friends. The BMW M2 Mixed Reality is one of the strangest, most interesting, exciting, things I’ve ever seen virtual reality do. And we experienced it all from the driver’s seat.
We popped over to Lisbon, Portugal, for the Web Summit 2022, and while on-site, BMW invited us to test their ///M Mixed Reality. The project uses a lot of high-end tech, including a VR headset from Varjo and a Smart Track device from AR-Tracking. The elevator pitch for this is that you sit in the driver’s seat of a BMW M2, while wearing a VR headset, and you actually drive the car. But instead of the real world you’re actually in, you’re seeing a virtual reality world.
In this new video, you can experience the BMW M2 with a VR headset, on virtual race track, yet in a physical empty parking lot. What we saw through the headset was a digital, futuristic racetrack, like something out of an arcade game. We drove through it, collected Roundel tokens in the track like it was Bavarian Mario Kart, and had to stop in a digital box. In reality, we were actually driving and even sliding the real BMW M2, with a safety engineer in the passenger seat. So in a way, we were immersed in a virtual world physically driving the new G87 M2.
The experience is quite surreal and you are certainly fully immersed into this VR world. The 4K graphics are impressive and the tech is equally exciting. The VR headset adjusts its video quality by tracking where your eyes are looking and there is virtually no distinguishable lag. Of course, that’s partly because there is a consumer-grade gaming PC sitting in the trunk with very short cables connected to the VR headset and the Smart Tracking devices.
Varjo is the company that makes the headset but Art is the company that makes the tracking bar, which tracks the driver’s head movements. There…
