Watched this on BBC's "Click" and immediately thought of Assembler. http://www.realtimerace.com/ An amazing piece of software / gaming development.
I saw that the other day as well. Looks like an interesting idea but I can't help feel it will be more like those old Laser Disc racing games. You know, race in realistic areas but actually have not effect on the outcome of the race. At least this new system gives the freedom of being able to drive anywhere though. Yakumo
It's an interesting idea, but VERY disorienting at a high level of detail in practice. All you have to do is look at Google Maps street-level view to see how distorted a picture like this can get. A single point of view image (e.g. from the top of the camera car) simply cannot give great results when you try to present it as a different perspective.
There was an explanation on the BBC program itself, which if you have access to you should watch. To the rear of the car is a laser which gathers (if I remember rightly) 1.3million reference points a second. In other words it goes way beyond Google Maps etc. It takes the initial 5 angle shot, but then digitally meshes this with the laser data. So it is much more accurate, more detailed AND more importantly can put you anywhere on the track, to the side of the track or anywhere within quite a large footprint. Just to allay your fears.
I watched the linked video before and I will admit that it does go a step further than Google Maps. Laser imaging does really amazing things with 3D modeling, but the problem is effectively texturing the model (the track in this case). It is a physical impossibility to present any angle on the track from a single image due to perspective, lighting, occlusion (not necessarily a problem here, but it could be for objects in the distance), etc. Using the laser survey data may be able to (relatively) accurately portrait the shape, size and landscape features of the track and vehicles, but it will never be able to give a perfect view from any angle. I'm not saying it is bad, I'm just saying that it is not "real cars on real tracks in TV quality" as is stated and implied in the video. Of course, I get irritated when a bad compression algorithm gets used on a TV show or the refresh rate of a display device isn't high enough to prevent flickering in my peripheral vision, so I may be a bit picking when it comes to video quality. :lol:
Fair point! My main concern is the way you'd have no real effect on other cars you encountered on the track. Of course I am not suggesting for a second that Johnny A at home should be able to crash into a F1 car and send it spinning off the tracks (although I believe certain F1 drivers have been known to crash their own cars (cough!*)) However, part of the fun of driving in an game is that the physics is getting more and more accurate and if you prang, you bloody prang! The laser disc gaming experience indeed. I am however really interested to see where this leads.
Honestly the one thing most racing games are lacking is driver personalities, and if this could be used to get tons of small statistics to make racing finally jump to that next level, then great
