The third-person view can make it difficult to drive a virtual car, but what about for driving an actual car? Turns out it’s not so easy, as the following YouTube video reveals.
The video sees two drivers given a pair of video goggles that obscure their view. They are then tasked with driving a Mazda MX-5 around a circuit at Bovingdon Airfield, with only a hexacopter drone with camera hovering behind providing a view of the track.
It appears space is plentiful but that makes the challenge, which pits the two drivers against each other in a time trial, no less difficult. In fact, both of the drivers said it was as if the video feed was lagging – even though that was apparently not the case.
You can see why the challenge is especially challenging when you catch a glimpse of view the driver is getting from a shoddy, low resolution helmet display. As the video narrator describes it, it’s a bit like a “Game Boy held at arm’s length”.
The video’s producer, Tom Scott, said the original plan was to attempt driving with an overhead camera like in the original Grand Theft games, but strong winds made that an impossibility and so a third-person view was adopted.
There’s absolutely no reason why you would ever need to drive in the third-person in real-life, but who cares when the video is entertaining. Maybe Recombu Cars should give it a blast, only with a game controller instead of a steering wheel?
Check out ten examples of when reality and video games collide.
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