Thoughts and musings from my simracing brain...

Disclaimer: This is my own personal "pipe dream", which will never see the light of day due to simracing being too niche and VR being even more niche.

I have been around simracing since the early games like Indy 500 and F1GP (if they can be considered simracing). I have experienced nearly all sims in some form from flat screen, now spoiled because of VR immersion. I miss not seeing hires textures and the tradeoffs I have to put up with for sitting inside the game. But I personally can't go back to a screen because I am too aware of it being flat, with no depth perception (your experience will vary of course).

Now with that blurb out the way... what is my "pipe dream" when it comes to VR?

What I appreciate about VR is feeling inside the game, but what I dislike is having to navigate 2D menus, click options and settings. What if all interactions took place inside a virtual environment. What do I mean? Here are some examples:

• Main menu... could be sitting inside a garage, with interactable elements to choose further options. Even with a 3D in the centre to closely inspect or interact with.

• Career mode... taking place in an office across from an NPC to interact with, dialog options for things you need to change and get done.

• Off to the track.. You are sitting in a virtual garage/pit with your engineers and staff around to interact with. Maybe you need to speak to one of the them to change some setup options? Talk about pit strategy?

• About to his the track... similar to the F1 games where you sit in your cockpit with your pit crew moving about taking on their tasks. A simple look over to interact with a certain member to grab their attention. Maybe they hand you telemetry to analyse which they hand you. Monitor is moved down from the garage ceiling to monitor pit timings and leaderboard before you go out.

• All of the above... no 2D menu in sight, every setting change or change to a different location/game mode, takes place inside a virtual environment. Virtual controllers not necessarily needed.

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Now..... as I said at the start with my disclaimer, this is a "pipe dream" for VR with no real hope of it coming true unless I fund it and develop with a team of passionate VR simracing folks. Slim chance to no chance at all... but what has been a brain worm for myself for a while, is now yours :D

I'd be interested to know what you would implement if you could to push the simracing genre into doing something different (if funding wasn't really an issue).