Innovation is our regular column highlighting emerging technologies and predicting where they may lead

Hammering down the straight in a Grand Prix racing game, you're keeping challengers at bay with some deft manoeuvres. But just as you take a perfect racing line into a bend, disaster: your flatmate plonks a steaming mug of coffee in front of you, denting your concentration; before you know it you've slipped back and the chances of a podium finish look slim.

It's a harsh lesson but that goes with the territory when you're competing against professionals. For while you've been sitting in your front room, your opposition have been battling it out in a live Formula 1 race.

Two European companies are racing to perfect real-time race gaming technologies that let you do this. Both aim to use live streams of GPS data collected from race cars to populate a detailed digital doppelgänger of a racetrack on a PC or games console.

The two firms – IOpener Media of Aachen, Germany, and Real Time Race of Daresbury, UK – share the same basic idea: to let people race against professional drivers while those drivers are actually racing.

Need for speed

To do this, the firms place a 500-gram box of electronics about the size of two packs of playing cards in real-world race cars. GPS receivers and accelerometers in the box stream a live readout of the vehicle's position and acceleration wirelessly to trackside receivers. "The inertial unit measures the g-forces on the cars so we can capture their true motion for the game," says Christophe Dujarric of IOpener Media.

The cars' positions are then injected onto a virtual track for relaying to the gamer over the internet. To build their model tracks, both firms scan the race circuit before the competition using the same tech Google does for its Street View service: a panoramic camera and a laser radar, or lidar, mounted on a conventional car.

iOpener’s beta test of their Real-Time Racing game continues next Thursday (March 11th) with a new event at Zolder, featuring the Mini Cooper S and the BMW Z4M that was first tested during the ten hours of Zolder.

The beta test will allow thousands of RTR testers to race in real-time against professional drivers on the Belgian track, right from their home.

If you don’t have a Real-Time Racing beta key yet, this is your chance to win one as iOpener is giving away two keys for those who can answer a rather simple question. The winners will get their key in time to join the event next Thursday so click here and enter the competition.

From VirtualR