Porsche: Ice racing in the warm room 🎥
VIRTUALLY ON THE MOVEMENT The Porsche Virtual Roads project makes it possible to quickly digitize a favorite route-whether on snow or asphalt. All it takes is a smartphone with the appropriate app.
With the new Virtual Roads software, your favorite track is quickly on the simulator.
Experiencing the most beautiful routes over and over again without actually taking them under your wheels. To this end, Porsche developed a new software solution in collaboration with the Swiss start-up Way Ahead Technologies.
The Virtual Roads project is designed to give drivers the opportunity to quickly and easily transfer their favorite routes from reality to a video game for the first time.
Artificial intelligence captures the environment
Tracks for racing simulators are scanned and digitized by experts using lasers. Porsche now wants to significantly simplify this complex procedure on the way to making Virtual Roads ready for the market.
In the future, Virtual Roads will allow any route to be recorded behind the windshield with the help of a smartphone and the corresponding app and transferred fully automatically into the virtual world. For this purpose, the recordings are converted into a 3-D environment.
The virtual ride is made possible by specially developed software that uses artificial intelligence to record the road and the immediate surroundings, such as guard rails and trees. Data protection plays an important role in the development. The program ensures that no other road users find their way from the real to the virtual world.
Training for particularly ambitious pilots
The file of the favorite track created with the help of the new application is currently also compatible with the racing game Assetto Corsa. Thus, Porsche drivers and fans of the brand have all the possibilities of the virtual world at their disposal.
The route can be experienced over and over again on any suitably equipped simulator or via smartphone. This applies to the vacation trip along the American West Coast as well as to the hot and cold ride on the circuit of the GP Ice Race in Zell am See.
Save times and measure them with others
Ambitious drivers can thus safely tackle a demanding route, record times and compete with others.
Roger Rüegg of Way Ahead Technologies (center gallery): "After several years of development work, our software is now so advanced that it can implement the digitization of routes of up to eight kilometers in length in under an hour for Virtual Roads, depending on the complexity."
