FPV

[jon burrows]

I was wasting some time while commuting to work this morning, and I discovered the world of fpv (first person view). Wow! My first thoughts as it seemed it was generally hogged by flight models, but I found some RC car videos. While it may not be something new, it is new to me (being out of rc for a while). So the first place I came was rc10talk and searched, with zero returns. I was generally surprised. Does anybody have any fpv experience with rc? More specific vintage racers (rc10 ) since this was not out while edin /caddy were on the shelves, it would be cool to race with them in first person view (not simply just a camera recording after a race), but kinda "in the action".
please share your views.

jb

[Coelacanth]

I don't think that would be too feasible, except for interest's sake. I assume you mean to race while watching a first-person video from a cam mounted on your car, instead of the usual way. There are a lot of complications I can think of that would make this problematic.

You'd need a pretty big monitor to be able to drive effectively. So would everyone else who's racing. That would require a lot more space than it does to have a bunch of guys standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

Offroad cars are always jostling and bumping around, flipping over, etc. and I don't know about you, but unless a car is driving very smoothly, I get motion-sick watching people's FP videos recorded from car-mounted cams while driving their cars, jarring, jostling, bouncing around, flipping and rolling over, etc.

Crashing and endo's and rolls would be particularly disorienting if you're only looking at a video output from a FPV cam, instead of watching the car itself.

There's also always a slight delay in translating what you're actually doing with the car and what gets outputted to the TV screen, and even a few hundred milliseconds of delay wouldn't be beneficial while racing. Racers sometimes complain about servos and responsiveness not being quick enough, well this would be very much like that.

Would it be cool to try? Sure...but not very practical.

[8rad]

Not to mention it would be a lot more difficult judging the terrain ahead of you from 3 inches off the ground rather than 15 feet up. It would be very challenging.

I think it would be fun to try though.

[jon burrows]

from the kits i saw online, i didnt post the link to the site because i didnt know if it was allowed to reference a specific manufacturer or not, but anyway, they have fpv goggles that give it a virtual experience.
i can see the problems with bounce and nausea...but

[Timmahhh]

I agree that with typical racing it would be nauseating. I thought about doing something like this with my scaler though. I think 6 MPH with the 55t motor would be a lot more tolerable.

[Coelacanth]

I've seen FPV vids of cars with well-tuned suspension on more or less smooth roads, in that case it would be more feasible, but with cars having less ideal suspension setups, it's just way too bouncy and jarring.

The other thing that wasn't mentioned is that, from that view so low down to the ground, and with those mini-cam's somewhat fish-eyed perspective, you don't really "see ahead" well enough to use the video to drive effectively. You don't really see objects in the distance well enough until you're almost right on top of them.

[jon burrows]

I agree that you couldn't see ahead, but if you are in the first person view in a car, you necessarily wouldnt be able to see ahead either. Perhaps it could make driving quite interesting. I agree there would be a lot of things to be worked out, but in foresight, it seems something I'd definitely love to try
I just did some quick online researching because the fisheye would make it real difficult, it looks like a wide variety of cameras come in different viewing angles, as well as some with pan & tilt with two additional micro servos.

I never said it would be cheap or easy, but very interesting.

[Phin]

If you ran the camera and goggle set-up through a laptop, image stabilization software could be run to counteract most of the normal driving bounce...but not the jumps and crashes of course. Camera mounts in the car could also be designed to be less static and even rotate FOV as you turn your head....though that would likely be a better fit in larger scale cars.

The next step for a more "realistic" driving experience would be a specialized steering servo that sends signals back to the radio for force feedback.

[Coelacanth]

And pretty soon, your RC car will look something like this:

[Phin]

Nah ya cars would look the same....it's your radio controllers that will look different.

[Coelacanth]

Nah ya cars would look the same....it's your radio controllers that will look different.

So you mount all the camera and motion-stabilizing equipment on the radio transmitters??

[jon burrows]

http://rcexplorer.se/Educational/FPV/FPV.html
Getting started in FPV

[Coelacanth]

I think there's quite a difference with how this works on a plane vs. on a car. Planes don't have to deal with an unending series of bumps & jolts, plus you get a much better "from above" perspective than a cam mounted less than 6" from the ground. I've watched YouTube vids of first-person cams mounted on both planes & cars. Someone recently posted a FPV vid he took flying his plane, it looked nice and smooth. The ones on cars, however, make you sea-sick like watching "Blair Witch Project" while drunk. Just check out car-mounted cams on YouTube for yourself and you'll see what I mean.

[Phin]

Nah ya cars would look the same....it's your radio controllers that will look different.

So you mount all the camera and motion-stabilizing equipment on the radio transmitters??

A little bit of it would have to be in the steering servo but radios could be built out of a low end ARM CPU and some memory chips to process the images from the cameras and the signals from the servo. It would be more economical for most to run the radio and goggles connected through a laptop or even a smartphone, though at the same time if the radio has an ARM chip it could also run the software for an ESC.

[proffesso]

FPV looks like a lot of fun, however I would want to do it on a well setup 1/8th or better, 1/5th size truck, get a proper camera stabilizer in there.

ive seen some vids of some cars just chasing eachother around a track, really looks like a lot of fun...sure, nowhere near as quick as out of the car, but a lot more fun