On a trip to PlayStation’s Singapore Office, we met and held an interview with Kazunori ‘Kaz’ Yamauchi, CEO of Polyphony Digital as well as the Director and Producer of the Gran Turismo series who told us more about the future of the series, particularly when it comes to VR technology.

Kaz has been behind the wheel of the Gran Turismo series from its inception. As the CEO of the series developer Polyphony Digital, he has been the producer and director of almost every game in the series but more than that he’s also been a lifelong fan of cars and a professional racer, competing in events like the 2012 24 Hours of Nürburgring.

We actually interviewed Kaz last year around the launch of the latest game in the series, Gran Turismo 7 as well as celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the series. For this latest interview, he spoke more about the game’s recent implementation of PSVR 2 and how it allows for a more lifelike driving simulator where players will need to physically be aware of their surroundings and turns if they wish to reach the finish line.

GT7 is available for PSVR 2, could you talk about the little details to make it into PVSR 2? And is there anything that you can tell us about the productions behind those?

So what’s really the focus in it and what’s important in creating something in VR is the fast frame rate and you have to draw a stereo image for each eye, so you need to be able to draw them for two screens and keep a very low latency. And you need to clear all those items in order to produce a good VR experience.

And in order to achieve that, it becomes a battle to really try to not drop the quality of the asset so much but make the data as light as possible and create a rendering engine that can render it as fast as possible.

Considering your own racing history, are there any experiences that you wanted to bring from the driver’s seat to the GT series? And I think that in terms of PSVR, it is more interesting because you can actually see what’s inside the car and what’s not.

So, in talking about the relationship between real racing and VR, in a real race when you are on a straightaway, you are already looking at the turning point of your next corner, and you know when you’re getting to the breaking point and you start braking, you’re already looking at the apex of the turn, and that’s something you can only do in VR and that’s one thing I really want to achieve.

I wanted to create in VR, because you know when you use this in VR then you actually naturally feel when you need to brake and you know which way the car needs to be pointing when you are trying to go through a corner. I think that’s something that you are now able to feel physically when you are playing in VR and that connects to a more real experience. 

So in VR when you are understeering, you start doing this and you start looking the other way as where you turning into steering mode, but you can’t do that when you are looking at a flat TV. In VR, you do the same movement that you would do on the real racing track, for example when you are drifting you are looking one way but actually steering in the other way, so that’s something you can do in VR now.

There is a certain romance to appreciating sports cars. Could you talk about conveying that love across the Gran Turismo series?

Yeah, You know Gran Turismo was really based on a really simple motive, to convey the beauty of cars, the beauty of environments and sceneries, to convey the fun of driving and those are the things that have not changed over the years. There are a lot of people who are involved in the production of a single car, which is designed, engineered, and everything. And it is really about you conveying their love and passion for cars and that’s something we really enjoyed doing.

So we saw some feedback about GT7 being a little bit too repetitive. Do you plan to add more challenges or new tracks in GT 7 to make the grinding more fun or challenging?

 Yes. And updates for Gran Turismo 7 will still continue for quite some time, I believe. You know, I think one of the reasons why people start feeling that maybe that’s repetitive is that there’s actually too much content in Gran Turismo 7.

Because just to select a single car and a single track, and that’s already an effort right there because you have to go through all these different menus to find those things.

Since you said that you need to go through a lot of selection, do you have any plans to make it simpler or some adjustments on that?

Yeah like I said Gran Turismo has become too big, making it become too complicated for kids to just pick up and start playing it because there are just too many options, erm so I do think it would be good to provide a simpler Gran Turismo in the future. And the music rally we included in Gran Turismo 7 is sort of an experiment in that direction.

So in GT6, There is a companion app with a track path editor because it launches after the game is out, do we see anything similar that is coming to GT7?

I can’t say no, but it’s not something that will come up very soon. So you know when you make something that you have a great deal of freedom on what you can edit, it drops the quality of the product, but if you go the other way and you raise the quality of what you can create, the degree of freedom you have to edit some track becomes more limited and restricted. So it’s really a converse relationship, so it’s a very difficult balance.

The design philosophy behind the cars has changed in recent years, do you think that this also changed the GT series in some ways?

Of course, I think we recreate real cars and put them into Gran Turismo. So you know Gran Turismo changed with whatever is happening in the real world in terms of design, but at the same time the people who are working in the car industry right now are all people who grew up with Gran Turismo, so I think the cars that they experienced in Gran Turismo is now in turn affecting them as they create new cars.

Are you involved in the Gran Turismo movie? How is that coming along?

So I was only involved in the first script that they produced for the movie and haven’t been involved since then, so I am actually looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Can you tell me your favorite car? Perhaps the top 3 if you can’t pick one.

That’s a really hard question right there because there are a lot of attractive cars out there. I mean for example I really like the shape of the Ford GT. But you know more recently there are a lot more cars I love like the Cinquecento (Fiat 500), which is really cool and it is a really tiny car. 

I mean you got to love a lot of different types of cars. When I was young, you know, I just liked good-looking cars.

What about like your favorite race track? Because you have been a racer for quite a number of years. 

That would be the Nürburgring no doubt. There is no other circuit that fun and it’s different every time you go there, there are temperature and weather changes. Every time you drive there it’s a different track.

For almost 30 years, Gran Turismo has probably been a part of PlayStation. Can you talk about having a series constantly pushing the home consoles like that? 

I think one thing that drives us is curiosity, So that would be the curiosity for new technologies, new forms of expression. Those are the things you are curious about. And of course, we always want to entertain the users. That’s the major driving point.

Cars are really wonderful

Kaz ended the interview with the following statement: “Cars are really wonderful, and learning to drive them is really one of the more important experiences you can have in your life, so I would really love to see people enjoy it more”.

Many developers are passionate about the games they make but it’s interesting to see a director whose love extends to the greater culture surrounding the game. We thank Kazunori Yamauchi for speaking to us in this interview and wish him the best of luck and he and the Gran Turismo series drive forward into the future. 

The latest Gran Turismo game, Gran Turismo 7 is available for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.