VIRTUALLY PERFECT

Are VR and driving sims a marriage made in gaming heaven? h ?

There’s a lot of debate over how suitable the new VR headset duo is for various types of gaming. But most agree the big problem involves moving around in the virtual game world. It’s a major problem to simulate walking around a game world, even with a big space. You soon run into the limitations of the real world.

But driving games don’t have that problem. You sit in the seat and that’s it, just like the real world. Bodily, there’s no need for you to move another inch. Perfect. What’s more, a VR headset helps a lot with one of the trickiest bits in adjusting to a driving sim: depth perception and judging distances. Combined with minimal physical feedback, it can make things such as picking braking and turn-in points, along with generally positioning the car on the track, much harder in a sim than real driving.

If there is a problem with using a VR headset, it’s not specific to driving games. It’s that screen-door effect, due to the limited resolution that impacts all gaming. It’s a problem that will almost definitely be solved olved with higher-resolution iterations of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in future. For now, it’s something you just have to adjust to. Of course, it’s also worth remembering that VR headsets are very demanding when it comes to rendering power. You’re pumping more pixels at a higher frame rate than when using a 1080p projector at 60Hz refresh, that’s for sure.

A VR headset is probably the best overall display solution for fully immersing you in the driving sim experience. But we found that a short-throw projector was a remarkably effective secondchoice setup. The caveat to that is that you’ll have to put a little work into getting the field-of-view settings right to give you the most realistic view out of the car. Switching off the rendered steering wheel, and sticking with simply the view through the windscreen, makes sense, too.