CompleteCar.ie drives a real Audi in a city that doesn’t exist, and tries not to be violently sick in the process...
The nausea doesn’t truly hit until we’re back in the car park and the affable German chap sat in the passenger seat of the Audi A4 tells us to look down. We don’t at first - we look to the right to reply directly to him… and, terrifyingly, there’s no one there. Then we look down and, with quite a significant amount of alarm, we notice our arms and legs have disappeared; at which point, our brain gives up trying to decipher the mixed messages we’re receiving from our various senses and simply says ‘you now want to barf; quite badly, I might add’.
Strange that we suddenly feel like we want to chuck up, because all we’ve done is drive a diesel A4 DSG saloon up and down a flat bit of tarmac at Munich Airport. At 40km/h, max. Said flat bit of tarmac is also just 300 by 600 metres, so it’s not like we’ve been on a bumpy high-speed ride that could have upset our (obviously) delicate constitution.
However, given we’ve just said our corporeal presence is no longer visible, you’re probably wondering what on Earth is going on. And it’s at this point that we have to bring up the matter of Virtual Reality, or VR. Because, while the majority of our body is in the real world, the brain has been transported somewhere else entirely.
You’ll all be familiar with VR, especially if you’re a properly hooked-up, online 21st-century gamer. A bulky headset slips over the user’s eyes and transposes them into a highly realistic, digitised world where they can do all manner of things, like disembowel enemy soldiers, fly a trading craft through the outer reaches of deep space, or test out the highly exciting Audi Pre-Sense City assist technology in perfect safety. Sorry, what? Hold on…
Before we reveal the solution to the mystery of the haunted Audi A4, the nausea comes on because it’s one thing to experience VR when the rest of your body is sat perfectly stationary in the physical realm; but it’s quite another when you know fine well, through what you’re feeling and hearing, that you’re in fact on the move in reality. Your brain is therefore getting one set of messages from your eyes, and quite another bunch of conflicting information from your hands and ears.
And with the Audi Virtual Training Car (VTC), what the German carmaker has done is create the world’s first mobile VR simulator. In an Audi A4. Yup, you slip on a VR headset - effectively blinding you to the very real and very solid surroundings of the A4 - and you’re transported to a super-clean, super-organised city that’s made up entirely of polygons. It’s a nice place, wherever we are; no graffiti, no ugly Brutalist architecture sullying the skyline, no people wandering aimlessly around or looking like they want to mug you for your smartphone. Also, every other car is an Audi of some sort, with older and newer models represented (shame no one at Ingolstadt dropped in a ‘C3’ 200 for giggles and nostalgia, though).
The idea is that you, or more specifically Audi’s global car dealers, can test Pre-Sense City - which primes the brakes and uses the sensors to watch the road ahead at speeds of up to 85km/h to prevent or mitigate any potential accident - without having to go out onto public roads and risk either: a) rear-ending a car ahead because you were going a gnat’s too fast for the system to respond, or b) mowing down an innocent pedestrian for much the same reasons of inappropriate speed.
It’s an ingenious idea that Audi uses in order to better train its global sales force on the driver assist systems that we can take for granted in the automotive world. Think about it; how do you adequately explain something as simple as blind-spot assist to someone, without boring them half to death? But it’s a useful piece of kit, isn’t it? And what better way to see how it functions and what it can do for the inattentive driver than to experience it in action. The rationale here is that the dealers have to understand this sort of driver-assist technology just as well as, if not better, than the prospective car buyers, so all sales staff across the world are flown to Munich at some point to try the VTC out.
So, in the VR world, the cabin of the A4 is beautifully represented. Instinctively, you reach out with your left hand for the door pull and when your appendage hits the real car’s door card, you’re only a few millimetres out from where the lever is situated. Grasp the steering wheel that’s sat in front of you - you’ll feel the rim, but no hands will reach up in the digital reality. Look left and right, and the digital world moves naturally; that’s because the rear headrests of the physical Audi are now cameras logging all head movements of the driver, in order to transpose them into the VR programme.
Sadly, the VR city is not an open-world environment that you can explore - given what would happen to the real A4 if you decided to hang a right at the first set of digital lights; you’d basically plough through a fence onto one of Munich Airport’s main runways, probably in right front of the 1pm arrival of an Airbus A380 straight outta Dubai - so you drive a tightly controlled route out of a car park, through a set of lights, before navigating a cone slalom on a city street to get a feel for the real/digital steering inputs (they’re a perfect match, naturally), then you head up to a roundabout and swing all the way back down the same road. Halfway along your return journey, conducted at 40km/h as that’s the speed at which Audi says Pre-Sense City can actually stop the car before an accident in all conditions, a madman on a bicycle zooms out from the left, veers around wildly in front of you and then crashes into the pavement on the left-hand side of the road.
Instinctively, you look left at the carnage of this cyclist-sidewalk interface scenario… only to miss the dim-witted digital pedestrian who has now stepped out ahead of you from the right. A super-clever ‘Flex-Ray’ interface system tricks the Audi’s real-world sensors into thinking a human is in front of it, when of course the tarmac is empty, and the A4 suddenly brakes hard without any need for input from the VR-wearing driver. Job done: the benefits of Pre-Sense City demonstrated in a tailored environment, with absolutely zero risk to life and limb in the real world.
From the outside, a bystander will see the VTC A4s moving cautiously about, swerving around a line of cones that do not exist in reality, executing a wide 180-degree turn at the far end of the apron and then anchoring on for apparently no good reason. It’s eerie stuff, although not quite as eerie as sitting in an A4 in which you’ve been rendered completely invisible.
VR will be used for customer services in Audi dealerships soon and you can read all about that in our news section. There’s no doubting how incredibly clever the VTC simulator is, though, even if it’s reserved for salespeople only, and even if - for now - it can only show off Pre-Sense City and nothing else. But the uses of VR in improving the entire car-buying experience in an Audi showroom in the near future cannot be underestimated. Just make sure that, if you try on a VR headset when buying an A3 in a few years’ time, you’ve not had a big lunch if you’re a novice to the technology. Otherwise, the nice, high-tech showroom might quickly be decorated in a decidedly non-VR technicolour yawn… and that would be highly embarrassing.