iOpener, the Future of Racing Games

What's the thing people are screaming for when it comes to video games? "Realism! Realism!" Unfortunately, most of the games today are not able to give us the "Wow, so real!" feeling. Fortunately, a German company called iOpener Media has the answer to our problems and it comes with a solution that will literally bring real life racing into the virtual worlds! Just how cool is that?

The company plans to suck in real time GPS data from racing competitions and transfer them to our consoles and PCs, therefore allowing us to race against the biggest names in today's and tomorrow's Formula One competitions without leaving the room. Thanks to the GPS data which will be updated live (but also stored in order to offer replay-value), the happenings in real life races will be moved to our home screens and we will finally get the chance to play against the real Kimi Raikkonen or Lewis Hamilton! And no "impossible" difficulty level is able to bring us such a tough competition!

Still... this could also be considered a problem: it would be virtually impossible for the regular or even expert gamers to get close or beat the lap times of superstars unless their cars are tweaked - but that would, once again, ruin the "realism" part, right? iOpener does not have an answer to this specific problem at the moment, but it promises racing will still be a great experience, not a frustration brought by the fact that you can't defeat Hamilton.

It seems that we will get the chance to see this technology in action sooner than expected - Andy Lurling, founder of iOpener says that this September could bring us the first game that delivers real racing to the virtual worlds, since there are already a few developers interested in the technology (and we fully understand and agree with them).

iOpener's idea seems to be already successful, since everything has been taken into account and all the potential problems have been eliminated. For example, the "blending" of the real and virtual worlds will be as natural as possible, as Lurling explained. He said that the AI takes care of the situations when the real life driver is behind you and has to go by you. Normally, he would go straight through you since you basically don't exist in his real life race - but this thing won't happen thanks to the aforementioned AI which will take care to create a very realistic overtaking. Also, in case a virtual collision happens between a real and a virtual player, the real life character will always drive away - "We go for optimal realism but the game experience has to be right," Lurling said to BBC.

Now, all we have to do is sit down and wait for the first game using the iOpener to be released - and if all goes as planned, we will see it implemented, sometime in the near future, in biking, rowing, skiing and snowboarding games as well. Until then... just imagine how cool the next NFS game with this feature on would be!