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"  The first racing game I ever played was a quirky sportscar shoot-em-up called RoadBlasters. The objective was simple: Get to the end of the course without running on empty. The neon palette suggested a story set in some weird Mad Max future in which street racing daredevils barreled down highways avoiding oil spills and obliterating opponents with machine guns. Sometimes in the distance, there would be these futuristic cities resting on the horizon just out of reach. This was in the early 1990s, after the classic arcade game was ported for the NES. Racing games had already grown since their humble origins\u2014and have grown impressively since, from arcade cabins complete with four-banger shifters to the realistic simulation franchises of today like Forza, Gran Turismo, and the professional PC simulator, iRacing.  iRacing is the co-creation of Dave Kaemmer and John Henry. Kaemmer is a sim veteran having been the creative force behind Papyrus, a now defunct game company who created the heavily influential Indianapolis 500 in the late 80s and its last title Nascar Racing 2003 Season. The company lost its rights to the NASCAR franchise to EA and soon folded. But Kaemmer bought the source code and created iRacing with John Henry, billionaire and avid sim-racer. Since the company was founded in 2004, it&amp;#039;s served two types of consumers: the hobbyist and the professional. iRacing would take realistic gaming somewhere it hadn&amp;#039;t been before. But this is all the past. What about the future of racing sims? It turns out they are well on their way. Here&amp;#039;s how they&amp;#039;ll be realized. Racing Games: A Brief Visual History      A Full 360 With the release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this month, we&amp;#039;ve seen stunning automotive eye candy from Forza Motorsport 5 and Need for Speed Rivals. These games hope to take the experience of racing on the console to the maximum degree of realism. But some racers are moving beyond the holding-a-controller, staring-at-the-TV style of gaming. iRacing, a decade old PC-based racing simulator, is one of the first big racing names to take a step into the virtual reality space by placing players in the cockpit via the Oculus Rift headset. &amp;quot;Imagine driving in a car and having cars racing around you and not even having to worry about driving because it&amp;#039;s so immersive,&amp;quot; says Steve Myers, vice president of iRacing. &amp;quot;Your mind is just blown by what&amp;#039;s going on around you.&amp;quot; The Oculus Rift, a 2013 PopMech Breakthrough Award winner, gives users a fully immersive experience, allowing them to turn their heads and explore a virtual environment. In the case of iRacing, players can get in the cockpit to race against competitors around the world and look around the cockpit, seeing the whole interior as they look side to side and competitors in passing lanes.  Asphalt Anatomy What&amp;#039;s a new practice for Forza 5 is something iRacing has been doing for years: using a laser scanner to capture and replicate a racetrack inch by inch, as the game&amp;#039;s designers did at Lime Rock Park racetrack in Connecticut in 2006. &amp;quot;This has been a game changer in the racing space,&amp;quot; Myers says. &amp;quot;We take an engineering-quality laser scanner\u2026 and we take that to a race track. Sometimes it can take us over an entire week to get one race track because it&amp;#039;s millions and millions of points of data.&amp;quot;  iRacing takes that data and recreates tracks so that every bump, curve, slope, tree, and building is an exact match. Myers remembers one track in particular\u2014the Bathurst 1000 in Australia\u2014where drivers were clamoring to be included in the track&amp;#039;s beta testing so that they could practice before the race. Virtuality mimicking reality, or is it the other way around? Burning Rubber Nothing is more important in a racing game than understanding and recreating tire physics. Tires are infinitely complex, act differently in different conditions, and wear down over time, making their simulation a constant challenge.  &amp;quot;The one thing we&amp;#039;ve learned in this business that&amp;#039;s crucial to creating an authentic racing experience is the tire model,&amp;quot; Myers says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s an amazing piece of our code. Dave [Kaemmer] has been working for five years trying to create a new tire model for iRacing.&amp;quot; Creating the perfect tire model is impossible. Developers can only inch closer and closer to what is really happening when rubber meets road. Kaemmer looks at every aspect to how a tire is constructed, analyzes the oils needed to make that tire, and then creates a simulated tire that acts like its real counterpart. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the black science of what racing simulation is,&amp;quot; Myers says. &amp;quot;His bedtime reading is like the physical properties of polymers handbook.&amp;quot; The Next Lap The visual interface of racing games have evolved into an immersive, high-definition experience where cars are more beautifully rendered than reality, but motion simulation is nowhere close. And neither, for that matter, is the simulation of what it&amp;#039;s actually like to drive a race car. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s one thing that people don&amp;#039;t understand is that these drivers are basically marathon runners, sitting inside 150-degree cockpits and enduring 3Gs going in the corners,&amp;quot; Myers says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know how we get there, but I can see in the future trying to create what it&amp;#039;s really like to be in a race car.&amp;quot;  For now, iRacing is focused on capturing the complexities of how a track reacts to different conditions. Games have already implemented how rain affects race cars, but Myers calls iRacing&amp;#039;s vision a &amp;quot;live track,&amp;quot; as the asphalt reacts different whether in the sun or shade and how marbles\u2014bits of rubber that come off tires during a race\u2014accumulate in certain areas and affect a car&amp;#039;s performance. As racing games advance and more complexities emerge, the perfect simulation seems further away. But simulators like iRacing keep barreling toward that future in the distance. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a9731/a-look-into-future-of-driving-sims-16198094/>