High-octane technology hooks Tech.Ed crowd

It’s no secret that Intergen and many of our staff have a passion for motorcar racing.

At Tech.Ed 2010 we wanted to share this passion so we hired two racing simulators for our booth, which went really well. But this year we stepped it up and built four racing simulators that gave almost 300 people the experience of driving Australian Super V8s.

In essence, a racing simulator is a cockpit frame with a full-size adjustable car seat. It has additional mounts for a force feedback steering wheel, stereo speakers and a large flat panel monitor.

The racing simulator game, rFactor, is used by professional racing teams to help prepare their drivers for racing new tracks. It has an extensive library of mods that can be applied, making almost any racetrack across New Zealand and Australia available. After much debating and testing (read: racing) we chose a custom track that offered a good cross-section of fast, slow and technical bits.

The track was unashamedly branded in yellow and, similarly, the Super V8s were brazenly branded with Intergen and Microsoft livery.

We had a lot of positive feedback from those who tried the simulators, with over 130 returning to repeat the experience many times. Many drivers were highly competitive – only 0.3 seconds separated the top three.

The overall winner of the competition was Dominic Nathan from AA, who won last year as well. His prizes were a Windows Zune, a $100 MTA voucher and a $100 Super Cheap Auto voucher. Other participants got to take away their very own memento of the event – an Intergen-branded mini remote control car.

By leveraging the game's plugin architecture, Intergen was able to use Microsoft cloud technology to provide real-time leaderboard and lap information through a number of presentation platforms such as browser, desktop and phone.

The four simulators were controlled by a central rFactor server where we could turn on or off the driving aids, control race conditions and set various other constraints to help make the experience as intense as possible.

We used Visual C++ to hook into the rFactor Internals Plugin API, where we captured and streamed lap data received from the game to a socket. From the socket onwards we are in .NET land.

First of all, a Windows service parses the lap data received from the socket and asynchronously sent this to both a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service hosted in Windows Azure and to an embedded service in the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) leaderboard application.

In addition to the WPF leaderboard, we had a WPF driver registration application that also communicates with the WCF service hosted in Windows Azure. The WCF service uses the Entity Framework v4 to persist data to a SQL Azure database instance. The WCF service is also consumed by the WPF leaderboard for historical data, a MVC3 website (also hosted in Windows Azure) which was optimised for non-desktop device browsing, and a Windows Phone 7 application we also developed.

The cars proved to be a roaring success – and were perhaps the only real showcase at the conference of a live integration spanning desktop to cloud across the Microsoft technology stack. A number of punters seemed more keen on racing than attending the Tech.Ed sessions.

The simulators are now located in several of Intergen’s New Zealand offices. They will be used for other conferences and events that we will be involved in over coming months.

lee.herd@intergen.co.nz

It’s no secret that Intergen and many of our staff have a passion for motorcar racing. Lee is Practice Lead for Intergen's Central Enterprise Applications Practice.