The Challenge

We were approached by Vertical Productions to bring to life their ambitious brief for the Audi VR Driving Experience, a key attraction at the Audi Village during the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2015.

In line with Audi’s values of advancement through technology, Vertical Productions tasked us with the challenge to create an innovative 360˚ virtual reality driving experience to showcase the car handling of the Audi R8, RS 6 and Allroad Quattro on the famous and highly variable terrain at Stowe Circuit, Silverstone.

The Solution

Following the success of an Oculus Rift VR experience we created for Audi and Somo at the Goodwood Festival of Speed 2014, we wanted to invoke in the user a heightened sense of reality and thrill as they took the Audi R8, RS 6 and Allroad Quattro cars on a combination of track and off-road driving experiences that were suitable for each car. This was achieved by introducing a custom motion chair, to create an authentic sensation of the driving experiences. This added to the sense of presence when deployed alongside the Oculus Rift DK2 along with an element of theatre and extra buzz around the activation stand.

Installing our tried and tested 360˚ camera rigs into the passenger seats of the vehicles and capturing the footage, the technically challenging part was in the post production. In order to replicate the physical forces we spent time interpreting the motion of the cars from the 360˚ video content. This was programmed in Unity, a real-time games engine, to mimic in the motion chair the breaking, twists and turns, ascent and descent of the car on the track and off road routes. The end result is an interactive experience that gives users a more realistic sense of physical forces one would feel while being taken an actual test drive.

The Results

Over 1000 people went through the VR experience across four days.