South By Southwest has a real-life Mario Kart circuit for go-kart racers. You can see one person tear around the track in the video above, but the tech behind the whole thing is much cooler, especially when you let your imagination run wild.
Racers each get electric go-karts with radio-frequency identification tags, Go-Pro video cameras, and a wireless router to interact with the the track itself, other racers, and to send data to the big Wario Stadium-esque video board.
As players race around, they can hit speed boosts which are recognized by the kart systems. When that happens, the go-kart gets a signal to increase the juice and give a short burst of speed.
While this is an extremely cool experiement, the indoor-racing applications might be even better, especially if you were to implement a Google Glass or virtual reality system that turns track walls into multicolored bricks and shows shells and powerup effects in the racer's eyes.
Mario Kart 8 is out on Wii U later this year.
