VICA Manual - Mares Engineering

Immediate Safety Checks

Know the disable path before driving with any OpenXR display element.
Validate changes in solo, test, replay, or AI sessions before competitive use.
Do not treat VICA as race control, official approval, or a substitute for driver judgment.
Hide or disable VICA if visibility, frame timing, or attention is impaired.

Surfaces

VICA is VR-first. The OpenXR visor is the primary private-alpha surface, while monitor/HUD and OBS/browser output are shaped around the same semantic display elements.

Data Behavior

Display elements consume canonical VICA state. Missing, stale, invalid, or low-confidence data should hide the cue instead of presenting a guess.

Race Mode

The forward view stays sparse. Full standings towers, dense maps, broad telemetry graphs, and decorative HUD elements do not belong in driver race mode.

Current private-alpha elements

What the driver may see

Wind

A green radial segment shows where the wind is blowing relative to the car. Headwind points down, tailwind points up, wind from the right points left, and wind from the left points right. The segment starts away from the exact center to preserve the braking and apex view.

Incidents

A compact xN readout can show the current incident count when enabled and valid. It hides when the selected source is missing, stale, invalid, low-confidence, or when the renderer cannot show it safely.

Minimum corner speed

A small top-left boxed integer can show the latched minimum speed from the most recent meaningful slowing event. It is practice and qualifying oriented; race visibility remains a conservative product decision.

Relative

Relative is experimental. It presents nearby cars as temporal gaps, not lateral track position. Cars ahead appear above center; cars behind appear below center. Position-sensitive stale data hides instead of holding an old marker.

Curved Relative

Curved Relative is an experimental layout mode for the Relative element. It is not a separate release feature and does not approve normal or official-race Relative use.

Projected and worktree elements

Under development or future-only

Element	Purpose	Public-safe status
Caution	Warns of yellow/caution or conservative slow-car-ahead evidence.	Canonical/debug and OBS/browser MVP in a worktree; HMD rendering future.
Slowdown	Shows active slowdown penalty amount and time remaining.	Opt-in OpenXR MVP in a worktree; live SDK variable names still need confirmation.
Timings	Shows compact last-lap and best-lap references.	Opt-in OpenXR MVP in a worktree; practice/qualifying oriented.
Car Settings	Shows live in-car settings such as brake bias and differential state.	Mercedes W13 opt-in MVP in a worktree; other cars require verified adapters.
Race Picture	Shows whole-lap context with start/finish, turns, and car numbers.	Canonical/debug/OBS MVP in a worktree; HMD rendering future only.
Tinted Visor	Darkens very bright VR scenes as an explicit comfort aid.	Opt-in OpenXR MVP in a worktree; disabled by default and easy disable required.
Speed Memory Pair	Future two-value memory for corner minimum and straight maximum speeds.	Deferred concept. Current behavior is minimum corner speed only.

Disable and recovery

Fail open before guessing.

Private-alpha packages should keep disable paths prominent. Source builds currently treat VICA_DISABLE=1 as the hard bypass wherever possible. If you built from source, use the build-provided disable or layer-status scripts for that build before starting iRacing.

Exit the session or stop driving if visibility or performance is affected.
Disable VICA for the next launch, or set VICA_DISABLE=1 in the launch environment.
Stop any VICA telemetry service or local OBS/browser preview used for testing.
Restart iRacing and the active OpenXR runtime after changing layer state.

Troubleshooting

Common first checks

VICA does not appear

Confirm the element is explicitly enabled, telemetry is live or replay-backed, and the current session has the required variables. Missing data should hide the cue.

A cue disappears

Treat this as expected fail-open behavior when data is stale, low-confidence, unavailable, over layer budget, or renderer resources are not ready.

Frame timing feels worse

Disable VICA, repeat the same session without VICA, then compare. Do not continue driving with a graphics-adjacent layer that you suspect is causing repeatable stutter.

OBS output is blank

Confirm the local browser source is pointed at the intended localhost endpoint and that /state.json is fresh. OBS views may intentionally show richer context than the driver visor.