#25 – Switch
Posted on January 20, 2012 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comic
The actual driving part wasn’t so bad. It was things like parking or changing lanes or navigating through a crowd of children that drove me nuts. I knew this would be a piece of cake if I had a top down view. It would be so much easier to avoid obstacles and lawsuits.
Tags: car, goggles, video games
Just watchout for low bridges and wires.
there is actually stuff to walk around in 3rd person. but it’s a huge, heavy backpack with a camera on a stick. looks reaaally stupid.
Some guys on youtube did try something like that, making their pplaytesters walk while watching themselves from the side, like a sidescrolling game. Can’t remember their names now, though, but they do a lot of “videogame stuff in real life” like that.
Rooster Teeth, Immersion. Episode 4 or 5. They also did 3rd person driving, women’s armor, accuracy with unfamiliar weapons in a zombie apocalypse, horde mode in real life, video game food restoring health, and hammer space inventory. Freackin’ love RT.
I find this highly amusing.
Already loving minimumble.
That would be so useful sometimes IRL. Though peripheral vision does make up for a lack of third-person view.
s/does make up/does partially make up/
Oh wow … I’m thinking …
1x pair of those 3D video goggles you can get
1x pair of cheap video cameras
2x fisheye lenses (optional, depending on camera view angle)
1x roll of duct tape
1x standard camera tripod
various pieces of scrap metal, screws, nuts, bolts and a drill to make a bracket for it
some lego mindstorms or whatever and an old spare smartphone (with accelerometers) to move the tripod head up/down and left/right when you move your head
computer and/or that same smartphone in between to inject a HUD into the video stream
affix bracket to car tailgate. have the default view aimed slightly down and zoomed out as far as possible so you can see a few hundred yards ahead but also at least 180 degrees around your seated position, using the wide-angle lenses if necessary.
maybe also add one – or three – simple rear-facing webcams to provide inset rearview mirror images (overlaid on the visible part of the car body, for example)
BAM … instant close-chase-cam videogame mode. IN 3D.
Probably hugely illegal, and not very aerodynamic, but so long as you take time to get used to it off-road, use high-rez equipment, and over-engineer the heck out of it so it’s at least as tenacious as the typical wing mirror, I can’t see it being unsafe. You could even have it automatically switch to nightshot mode when it’s dark.
Gotta be careful of low bridges though. Don’t jack the cameras up TOO high!
(Actual, fully top-down view would be utterly impractical unless you had someone hovering over you in a helicopter and an inset mini forward view, given typical stopping distances, the need to follow traffic lights, etc; think something closer in spirit to Driver, GTA3 or Turbo Esprit rather than GTA1/2, Micro Machines or Tranz Am)
having a stash of turtle shells to throw at other cars might be illegal
Reading comment after comment on every single Minimumble is so entertaining…