At the PlayStation Experience conference in Anaheim Sony showed GT Sport running on PlayStation VR with a full racing simulator setup.
I took several laps around Willow Springs International Raceway, which pretty much blew my mind in the best possible way because the track is actually only 30 minutes from my house. I’ve driven by the raceway for 15 years, wondering what it’s like to actually drive on that track.
Now I know.
Sony tells me developers spent around a week at Willow Springs capturing the track’s every detail. I believe it. I get an incredible sense of presence looking at the rocky hillsides and green signs that look exactly like what I’ve seen studying the track from afar.
It appears to be just after dawn as the sun is creeping up over the Mojave desert. The windows inside the car are surprisingly small, forcing me to move my head around inside the cabin so I can catch features outside in the morning light, to literally keep myself on track. I can see every little detail as the yellow light casts on my steering wheel and dashboard. I press the pedal to the floor and accelerate toward the hillside. As I grip the wheel tightly and turn a corner, the dashboard goes completely black and I’m unable to see anything inside through the shadows.
The racing simulator features a subwoofer below my seat that is unfortunately not active for my demo, but I feel a lot of haptic feedback through the steering wheel as I tear around corners. The PlayStation 4 is stored where the hood of the car would be in the simulator, and the PlayStation Camera is mounted at the front of the unit for position tracking the headset. At one point I lose control of the vehicle and flip the car before finding myself righted again automatically, and ready to make my way back onto the course. I feel no discomfort during the crash.
My race is just a time trial by myself, reinforcing just how unfortunate it is that only a portion of GT Sport will be offered in VR. I wish we could get the whole game in VR and race against others, but it is unknown if we’ll be able to do that. Then again, I’ve dropped plenty of time into trying to cut seconds off my lap and get a license in Gran Turismo over the years. I could see myself sinking plenty of time into a course like Willow Springs all by myself. Driving around a course I know from the real world in a full racing simulator was easily one of the coolest and most satisfying things I’ve done in VR so far, and I can’t wait to return and memorize every inch of that track when it arrives in 2017.
