Mini Mixed Reality: Hold Onto Your Headsets Because This Is About To Get Weird

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive....'

"And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.”

I now feel I have an inkling of how Hunter S. Thompson must have felt. The other day, I drove a Mini off the edge of a platform into space. There I was, blithely assessing the ride quality of the new Mini Cooper SE, when the road just sort of ran out and I sailed out into nothingness.

Fortunately, for me at least, I lived to be able to tell the tale. That's testament to the fact that all four of my tyres were still firmly adhered to a gravel car park somewhere on the outskirts of Sitges, in Spain.

20

My view was what Mini called 'mixed reality' and it was, to be frank, one of the most bizarre driving experiences I've ever had.

Here's how it works. You're presented with a grey camo Mini called Jim. In the boot is a massive computer with all manner of wiring spooling out of it. In the passenger seat is a Mini engineer who, thankfully, is also equipped with a brake pedal.

You can't see a lot out of the car, because running across the windscreen is what looks like a home hi-fi soundbar. It's a head-tracking system that figures out where your noggin is pointed.

You don a wholly opaque VR headset which as a couple of cameras mounted on the front of it. This is key, because it renders a live image of what's going on in the car to the VR headset. Initially everything seems fairly normal. You're looking at a slightly lower-res version of normality as you bump the car around some cones.

Then the whole world goes wacky.

The car park is gone. The Mercadona supermarket across the way has vanished. The dull overcast skies disappear. Instead you're in a technicolour virtual world. Whales swim by in the sky. Giant condors sail overhead. The track ahead of you is festooned with giant playing cards, floating coins and chrome balls that you can nerf out of the way as you drive.

Look down and you can still see the car's interior, your hands and feet, the infotainment system and to your right you won't find your lawyer, Raoul Duke, but rather the Mini engineer, still poring intently over his laptop.

Look out of the windscreen, windows, through the sunroof and into the mirrors and it's a very different story. What's more, to get to the next 'level', you have to drive off a gantry into space.

20

Even though you know it's just a virtual render, every fibre of your being is telling you not to drive off the ledge, with this yawning abyss below.

All of your proprioceptive instincts are expecting the nose of the car to lurch downwards. And no matter how many times I do it, I couldn't shake that expectation.

Not everyone reacts the same way. I aim to keep the car on the sometimes vertigo-inducing track. I even apologise for kerbing a virtual alloy as I nudge up against the side of the track once.

20

The initial reaction of the lady in the car before me was to try to drive clean off the virtual world, almost driving the Mini into the coffee truck parked nearby, because motoring journalists cannot survive for 15 minutes without caffeine and savoury finger food.

Mini claims this is a demonstration of what can be done with the car's inputs and outputs, linking to a virtual world. I guess that, in time, you could make a shlep up the Monash freeway look like a drive across the Masai Mara.

Or, if you're more cynically minded, it could be a lucrative way to sell space on virtual billboards, with ads tailored to you. I'm not sure. I expected quite a lot of the new Mini Cooper SE and it didn't disappoint. I just didn't expect to be overtaken by a flying whale while driving one.