Skip to main content

Screw Farmville — you can now ride a snorting, drifting farm tractor in VR

Dorfdrift – spektakulär kurze Lieferwege
Sunshine, haystacks, fertilized fields — these pastoral features evoke a feeling of calm, productivity, and pride. But regardless of how appealing you might find the everyday activities of those who live off the land, it may feel like a hassle to try it out yourself. After all, the reality is that it an be very smelly and difficult work. You could also just be looking for a departure from your daily grind, but what do we know? Well, we know that you may not have to look much further than your pocket for that experience now, while avoiding the lingering effects of manure on your boots.

The Oculus Store for Gear VR now offers a complete 360-degree recording of a farm tractor’s daily tasks. Released with the title Dorfdrift, is a video was produced by Edeka, a large German supermarket chain. Perhaps you think you’ll be riding along the tractor to farm fresh vegetables and fruit, enjoy the sunny weather and almost smell the mud lingering in the air. Think again.

Recommended Videos

Dorfdrift’s official description reads: “Where do all the vegetables come from? Dive into the world of lightning fast fresh vegetables delivery of the Edeka market. Take a ride alongside the tuned farm tractor with a 450hp engine delivering fresh apples to your local store.” The above video is the original advertisement from last year, and it should give you a sense of what to expect from the VR version.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Since we’re all professionals here, we decided to dive into this experience of overpowered tractors to see if it’s worth your time. In the name of science, of course. While it’s highly dubious as to whether doing drifts on the field is a standard practice in farm life, it certainly had a lot of entertainment value. We believe that a four-wheeled monster farming machine shredding the mud is a worthwhile watch, though we’d recommend you stay away from the video if you have an easy time getting motion sick in VR. If you’re looking for other odd experiences for your Gear VR, you can always try out BUTTS.

The virtual tractor video can be downloaded for free from the Oculus Store for Gear VR.

Dan Isacsson
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Being a gamer since the age of three, Dan took an interest in mobile gaming back in 2009. Since then he's been digging ever…
Turns out, it’s not that hard to do what OpenAI does for less
OpenAI's new typeface OpenAI Sans

Even as OpenAI continues clinging to its assertion that the only path to AGI lies through massive financial and energy expenditures, independent researchers are leveraging open-source technologies to match the performance of its most powerful models -- and do so at a fraction of the price.

Last Friday, a unified team from Stanford University and the University of Washington announced that they had trained a math and coding-focused large language model that performs as well as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 reasoning models. It cost just $50 in cloud compute credits to build. The team reportedly used an off-the-shelf base model, then distilled Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model into it. The process of distilling AIs involves pulling the relevant information to complete a specific task from a larger AI model and transferring it to a smaller one.

Read more
New MediaTek Chromebook benchmark surfaces with impressive speed
Asus Chromebook CX14

Many SoCs are being prepared for upcoming 2025 devices, and a recent benchmark suggests that a MediaTek chipset could make Chromebooks as fast as they have ever been this year.

Referencing the GeekBench benchmark, ChromeUnboxed discovered the latest scores of the MediaTek MT8196 chip, which has been reported on for some time now. With the chip being housed on the motherboard codenamed ‘Navi,’ the benchmark shows the chip excelling in single-core and multi-core benchmarks, as well as in GPU, NPU, and some other tests run.

Read more
Chrome incognito just got even more private with this change
The Chrome browser on the Nothing Phone 2a.

Google Chrome's Incognito mode and InPrivate just became even more private, as they no longer save copied text and media to the clipboard, according to Windows Latest. The changes apply to Windows 11 and 10 users and were rolled out in 2024. However, neither Microsoft nor Google documented it.

Even though this change is not a recent feature, it's odd that neither tech giant thought it was worth mentioning. Previously, the default setting was that when a user saved text or images to the clipboard history, it was synced with Cloud Clipboard on Windows. Moreover, accessing this synced content was as simple as pressing the Windows and V keys, which poses a security risk, especially when using incognito mode.

Read more