VIRTUAL INSANITY?

We don our Virtual Reality goggles to drive a real BMW M2 around a digital racetrack using the company's latest Mixed Reality software

- Sean Carson

I'M sitting in the driver's seat of a new BMW M2. The 453bhp 3.0-litre twin-turbo straight-six engine is idling away in front of me with bassy menace - and the experience is made all the more pulse-quickening by the fact that, although I can see my outstretched arms and hands resting on the sporty steering wheel, above that my field of view is dominated not by the outside world and an expanse of tarmac in front of me, but a digital depiction of a racetrack projected onto the screen of the Virtual Reality goggles I'm wearing.

In a minute my instructor is going to ask me to floor the throttle and unleash the M2's performance to try and set a lap time around the aforementioned track. The car will be moving in time and space - I will be driving it and making inputs with the steering wheel and pedals - except I can't see anything of the real, physical environment in front of me. Welcome to BMW's M Mixed Reality demonstrator.

The technology has been developed in conjunction with Epic Games and uses a set of VR goggles linked to a sensor mounted on the M2's dashboard that tracks probes fixed to the headset and works out where the driver is looking and therefore what to show on the display screen. BMW says: "The system takes all movement and rotary axes of the BMW M2 into account. The vehicle itself becomes the controller, in this case the fastest controller in the world." It's still at the working prototype stage, but even this early test of the technology shows how advanced the system is.