We all love to drive on our favourite thoroughfares, but very few of us have time and money to hit our desired routes. Porsche Virtual Roads project will solve this dilemma, allowing you to promptly and effortlessly select your favoured roads from the real world and transfer them into a video game.
Porsche has partnered with a Swiss start-up, Way Ahead Technologies, to develop an advanced software solution to make this idea a reality. The application will allow you to fix your phone on your vehicle’s dashboard and record the happenings on the road. Porsche will then let you upload the recordings to a racing simulator.
While the car manufacturer from Zuffenhausen particularly mentioned the app’s compatibility with the Asseto Corsa racing game, it will support a number of other simulator games as well, letting you experience a route over and over again.
Porsche’s app will log everything on the road, including trees, crash barriers, and other objects, except the parked cars and the public. Surprisingly, the procedure will take less than one per cent of the time needed by conventional studios using lasers to digitalise a racecourse for a racing video game.
Obviously, quicker mapping can mar the realistic representation of the route, but the German automaker says the driver would be able to feel bumps and topography during the drive.
“If you ask people what they think is the most beautiful road, everyone has their own, very personal route in mind. The characteristics of the topography are what makes a route particularly attractive, regardless of whether it is a unique Alpine pass or a legendary coastal road,” states Robert Ader, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Porsche. “We want to trigger these great memories with a much simpler digitalization process that allows anyone to drive their favorite route virtually.”
The application will employ Artificial Intelligence (AI) to trace the roads, and data uploading would be superfast. Mr. Roger Rueegg from Way Ahead Technologies says, “After several years of development work, our software is now so advanced that it can digitalise routes for virtual roads of up to eight kilometers (4.9 miles) long in less than an hour, depending on how complex the route is.”
He also believes that the application will be able to take into account stats from Porsche’s chassis control system and G meters at some point to render a more accurate environment.
While we love to take a scenic holiday trip along the Cat and Fiddle Road in our Porsche virtually, we do not know when the company will roll out the app. We are, however, closely watching the progress of this Virtual Roads project.
