Pixelsumo is the blog of
Chris O'Shea, an artist and designer based in London.
Random project
Beacon
with Cinimod Studio
Live Drive
Posted January 18th 2007 under Advertising, Toys, Virtual Reality
Following on from my previous post about the work of Semitransparent Design.
This time, they have created an online driving simulator for Honda called Live Drive. A banner campaign on Yahoo! enticed people to the Honda Live Drive site. Once there, you would wait in a queue if it was busy and could speak to other people whilst you wait your turn. At the right time of day (Japanese working hours), you could enter the driving seat of a real scalextric mini, driving it around a track from within the Flash application. A wireless camera attached to the car gave you a first person perspective.
Unfortunately the obvious lag over the internet detaches you slightly from realtime reactions to corners etc. I tried as hard as I could to make it fly off the track, but it seemed impossible. I love the set design though, as you can see from above. With improvements on the latency and a higher resolution camera, this project would be much more polished. The images here don’t show, but the interface that the advertising agency (who have this set in their offices) use to control the project has a giant emergency shutdown button, just in case the cars get out of control. Nice touch.
Why do I blog this?
What’s interesting is a virtual world perspective, created by a real physical world.
I have seen this a few times. Fur made a first person pinball game, where you head is in the machine with flippers at eye level, called The Furminator. Toke Barter and Anthony Mace from the Royal College of Art created Virtuality, a tiny real landscape with controlled environmental conditions, viewed through a screen to give the virtual perspective. Francobelge Design created RC/Fight, radio controlled cars with mounted cameras. This is the same approach used by artist Sabrina Raaf in searchstoretrash, driving a car around tracks in the gallery from an alternative perspective.
Comments
(January 23rd 2007)
This is a very brilliant work. I stayed up late to give it a try but I haven’t had much luck. I could not figure out the controls because unfortunately I don’t understand Japanese. I could get the engine to run by holding the DRIVE button I could not make the car move forward.
Could you possibly share with me how one drives the car?
Nobody was helpful. They called me ã†ã˜ (maggot). :(
(July 9th 2007)
Hi Chris,
What an exiting project this LIveDrive by semipermanent! Actually I’m working on a parallel project => create a flight simulator (starfox like) only with paper buildings…
For the moment, this is just a basic motion, but hope to realize this project.
http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=8391852
Thx for your amazing post ;)
bye
P