Gran Turismo and Mario Kart were my favourite examples of fun and engaging virtual driving experiences. A long time ago, I had the wheel, pedals and vibrating seat for GT3 and even that created another level of immersion.
Aside from an open place to drive (it's a drive but there is good vacant expanses close to res land), what other challenges are you facing? And, what's the vision?
Finding an open place to drive could be less challenging if the go-kart had a better turning radius, so I could make the driving area a bit narrower. In that case, there would lots of parking lots where this would work, at least for the purpose of showing someone who wanted to try it. I've taken the current prototype as far as it should go. The architecture is really only suited for single player experiences. I wanted get to a point where I had convinced myself that the concept was feasible and fun, and I've done that. The ultimate goal of this project is to build a product that can function as an autonomous vehicle development platform. To get to there, I'll need to work with people who have built large multiplayer games and autonomous systems. So I'm done with the engineering for now until I've got a small team.