It’s time to look back again at the last three months, and see what happened around our driving simulation world.

Varjo XR-3

We received our first Varjo XR-3, which if you read my VR Headsets article, you know is probably the most exciting piece of hardware in the XR world at the moment.

I haven’t been able to do much with it yet, but I’ve been very impressed so far, as can be seen from this Tweet…

Threw a random (dirty) green sheet over a closet and started the @varjodotcom #UE4 template. I don't know what's more impressive: the mixed reality (🤯), the headset resolution, the hand-tracking, or the fact that it took 5 minutes to setup. pic.twitter.com/9SjfGCiRKw

— Bertrand Richard (@brifsttar) March 24, 2022

So few things to note, though. First, the Focus Area is slightly below the “headset horizon”, meaning if you look straight ahead, that screen will only cover a small fraction of your fovea. This is intentional, as this feature was added for extra accuracy on cockpits, so when the gaze is slightly lower. I’ve also had some trouble getting some features working (Lab Tools, Depth Occlusion), but support is really helpful.

Also worth mentioning that we’re years away from having powerful enough GPUs to feed that beast. All displays combined, it’s almost 12 megapixels at 90Hz. I’m hoping multi-GPU (e.g., NVLink) becomes a thing for such use cases, but I’m guessing it’s a huge amount of work to get this done. In the meantime, the resolution on the XR-3 can be changed very easily, so we run on lower settings, which still look better than our Vive Pro Eye.

We’ve got many things we want to try to do with this headset, and we’re really just starting. We’re confident it’ll find many applications for different use cases that we might encounter.

UE5

Unreal Engine 5 is out! I’ve made an entire article on that subject, so I won’t go into details here. In a nutshell: all new features look promising, but it might be a bit early for us to jump ship from UE4. It’s definitely the long-term plan, though, and I’m looking forward to playing with all the new toys!

RoadRunner R2022a

Speaking of tools that received an update, RoadRunner R2022a is out. I don’t talk a lot about RoadRunner, but it’s an integral part of our workflow, allowing us to very easily create road networks (both 3D and OpenDRIVE).

The new release includes an OpenSCENARIO-compliant Scenario Editor, which I don’t think will be of any use to us, as we author scenarios straight in Unreal, and are quite happy with it.

More interesting to us is the new Datasmith Importer, making the connection between RoadRunner and Unreal ever so efficient. As pictured above, there’s been improvements around heights, meaning we can now have nice sidewalk-road transition, which will be very helpful for upcoming projects. There’s also an OpenStreetMap importer, which always sounds nice on paper, but often has limited results, as OSM’s level of accuracy isn’t enough for OpenDRIVE networks.

RoadRunner has a lot of really great and intuitive features, one of which is the ability to very easily create custom road styles. So I did just that by adding a collection of french roads, mostly taken from my own neighborhood.

Pedestrians

One of our upcoming project will involve a lively city, and the researcher in charge is very active in making sure that we’ll have a wide range of pedestrians available. They’ve been creating Blueprints and Animation Blueprints for each. Right now those pedestrians’ animations are limited to walk and idle, but it’s a work in progress, and I’m quite confident we’ll have more to show in the future.

And I can’t not mention this kid playing football, who I’m sure will end up kicking his ball in front of a very unlucky (and hopefully very alert) driver. Physics are actually simulated on the ball, because why not?

NEWMOB

In our last update, we’ve introduced our new project called NEWMOB. This has been the main focus of our work since then, but we can’t show too much, as we’re still very early in development. This project also is the first time working with Unreal for the involved colleagues, and I think they’re pretty happy with it so far.

I actually plan to start a new series of article around this project; not focused on its content, but rather how we’re learning things along the way, how our workflow’s evolving, how we tackle new challenges, etc. I may have written an article about scenario authoring not long ago, but this project actually led to many developments on that front, and an update is needed. I’ve just been lacking inspiration to actually start writing.

To at least give some illustration to this section, above is a small GPS feature I quickly prototyped (you can still see the arrows in the real world!). It may or may not be used in this project, but I just love working with tools that allow me to iterate so rapidly over concepts and ideas. I’ll get more in depth about this on the future series.

SIMAX

SIMAX is our largest driving simulator, and it’s starting to show its age (over 10 years old). We’re thinking of upgrading the projection system to something more modern, maybe even change the car. This requires quite a bit of planning (and money!), so it will likely be one of our main project in the near future.

Virtual Driver

Our Virtual Driver is constantly being worked on and improved. There’s been quite a few bugfixes and improvements, especially to its Smart features, that allow it to navigate the road network more or less autonomously.

But the main change is that I finally moved the whole codebase to Unreal, making everything a UObject. Initially, the Virtual Driver was in its own library, because at the time we had our own engine, and didn’t know whether we’d move to Unity or Unreal. That’s long gone, and now, having all of those features properly integrated in the engine means more opportunities to add new features, and easier debugging. The image above illustrates that we can now easily adjust the Virtual Driver’s target speed at each tick, which previously required a bit more gymnastics.

Blendswap and Marketplace

And to close this entry, I’ve recently discovered Blendswap. I’ve found quite a few assets that would perfectly fit in our environments, so I went ahead and added them to our collections.

That doesn’t mean we stopped being heavy users of the Marketplace. As a matter of fact, we’ve got a new batch of items scheduled to arrive in the next few days. Those include, among others, the latest buildings and props from Meik.W, those nice looking (and cheap!) European Alleys, a few vehicles from our favorite Ukrainian creator lyoshko, some characters from new creator VR4D, and wheelchairs!