Roborace VR– At the 2018 Goodwood Festival Of Speed (FOS), Roborace’s Robocar accomplished the first-ever fully autonomous hillclimb, becoming the first driverless electric racing car to tackle the famous FOS hill. Guided purely by automated systems, the car was equipped with a variety of sensors, giving it 360º vision.

 

A 360º Hillclimb

Roborace wanted to create an experience that would allow visitors to the Festival of Speed to enjoy the hillclimb from the Robocar’s point of view and relive the historic moment.

 

 

A Custom Solution

 

This brief called for a custom-built, fully immersive VR experience. Working closely with Roborace, REWIND designed a bespoke camera rig that mounted to the car itself, with the ability to withstand the huge forces created by the Robocar’s stiff chassis and considerable torque.

In addition, REWIND had to conduct testing into appropriate production cameras – eventually settling on the KanDao Obsidian S, allowing the team to not only shoot the entire run in high resolution, but also at a rate of 50 frames per second, necessary for the user to experience the sense of speed when inside the experience.

 

 

REWIND then packaged the footage in an app designed to deliver high-resolution 360º video to the HTC VIVE Pro. The team also used telemetry data taken directly from the Robocar to drive the haptic simulation. The simulator was powered by DBox actuators, and designed and built by CXC Simulations.

The simulator was made available to the public at the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2018 in the Future Lab.

 

STUDIO: REWIND

 

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