You’re
in Monaco, watching the Formula One Grand Prix. In the grandstand
you’re sat next to an old college friend whom you haven’t seen in years.
The sound of race cars fills the air, the warm Mediterranean breeze
reeking of burning rubber and money. Moments later you’re in pit lane,
witnessing a pit stop from Ferrari’s timing stand. Next, you’re aboard
that very same red missile, flashing through the famed tunnel at 200
mph—the noise all-encompassing, the velocity thrilling.
In the future, virtual reality will make this possible—right from your own living room.
It’s
no secret that auto racing is struggling. Both F1 and NASCAR have seen
declining TV and attendance figures, sports car racing barely registers
to a mainstream audience, and the Indy 500’s ratings on ABC are lower
than an episode of Scandal.
Online forums are filled with suggestions to bring motorsports back into the limelight, and indeed I recently wrote about a fundamental recalibration of IndyCar racing
that might help. But the sport’s true savior—peering deep into the
future—could lie in the hands of a technology that has only just begun
penetrating the market.
Experts predict that within half a century,
the capability of virtual reality will be so realistic it will remain
difficult to discern what’s real and what’s not. The goal is total
immersion, or telepresence, where a person is effectively transported
from their living room to someplace else—be that Paris in the fall, a
spaceship on Mars, or the Daytona 500.
This transportation won’t just be visual.
Jean-Louis Dautin, the director of the VR technology center CLARTE,
said: “Virtual reality in 50 years is the illusion that is perfect in
all senses, whereby we can do everything as if everything around us were
real. That means physical sensorial feedback, impeccable audio-spatial
feedback, even odors.”
Combined
will be the ability to virtually interact with others, such as a friend
watching from his or her couch the other side of the world. In an
instance, you could be sat next to each other on the Mulsanne Straight
at Le Mans, smelling the exhaust fumes (if its not all-electric) and the
sausages grilling from the adjacent food truck.
How, exactly, we turn today’s VR headsets—like Oculus Rift
(Sony and HTC both have versions upcoming)—into a totally immersive
experience, where one can smell and to a degree feel things that are
happening live across the globe remains to be seen. There’s a wealth of
things that need to happen, but not long ago, the ability to Skype from
an airplane would have been an impossible dream.
By: Alex Lloyd.
Review: Emerging Market Formulations & Research Unit, Flagship Records.
For The #FacebookTeam