Third-Person Driving

Admit it.  You’ve been playing GTA and imagined the godlike wonder of actually driving your actual car from above.  You could see all the way around, all the time… anticipate any approach… parallel park with millimeters to spare… replay exactly how close you were to death over and over again for appalled relatives and potential passengers.

***DISCLAIMER*** Under no circumstances should you even remotely begin to ponder driving while looking at a laptop screen.  A bird’s-eye view is no substitute for your normal first person perspective, and you might get the mapping mixed up.  Think about the first time you drove in reverse. ***END DISCLAIMER***

I had originally considered towing a kite or a blimp behind the car, but there are a few technical challenges associated with both.  With a kite you’re playing the “Speed” game, trying to keep rolling above the minimum speed for the kite.  And when the inevitable happens, relaunching it in traffic.  Relaunching includes your buddy sprinting to catch up to his still-open door, dodging cars, while you try to keep the kite flying.

The blimp’s a bit more airworthy, but a blimp capable of carrying a camera and 10+ feet of USB cable is no Tiny Tim.  A bundle of balloons might work, but both buoyant bearers are bound to be beset by bouncycam bothers and consistent framing is less likely than pseudoscience saving mankind.

Enter PVC pipe!  A 10′ length of 1″ diameter pipe, some string, and a few connectors and you’ve magically hoisted your camera aloft!

The details are rather more sordid, what with all the screwing and sawing and stapling, but if you really want to know…

We cut off a short segment of the 10′ pipe, and slid a 90° adapter onto one end.  We drilled a 1/4″ hole through the opposite end of the short piece to accept the bolt that would attach the camera to the rig.  Or would have, but for a minor complication- no bolts of the right length.  Drilling the top hole out a bit more so the head could pass through, and inserting a big fender washer solve the spacing issue.  Yes, the fender washer also had to be bent.  It was a compound hack of beautiful inelegance.

Attaching the pole solely by the base would have permitted serious sway, and possibly a complete failure.  Fail’s rarely the goal, so a second hole was drilled, this time perpendicularly through the 90°.  We ran a string from this new mounting point down to the car, eventually to be tied to the seat belt pivots (a solution necessitated by a shortage of ohshit handles).

This was built over the holidays, so it wasn’t my car to drill into, tape onto, or rivet through.  A non-invasive solution was required.  We stapled a large piece of truck tire innertube to the underside of a 2×4 board, pounding the staples below the top surface of the rubber.  The innertube overhung the board by 4″ one side so that we could close the trunk lid on it, pinching the tube in place.  We drilled a hole in the board to match the PVC pipe, and press-fit the base of the pipe.  A screw through both the board and pipe provided some extra security.  Finally, pipe insulation was taped to the pipe at the point of contact with the top of the trunk.

We used a Philips webcam because it had a convenient 1/4″ threaded hole for mounting.  A USB extender (M-F) cable carries the signal all the way into the car (and to the eagerly awaiting laptop), ziptied to the pipe at sensible increments.

The software was troublesome, and it never worked very well.  I alternately used Picasa and Iris to capture the video feed, but both suffered from unholy levels of frame drop.  I suspect that my Thinkpad’s oversensitive “OMG STOP EVERYTHING I’VE BEEN SHAKEN” protection was the root, though that revelation’s just occurred to me and I haven’t tested it.  The drive protection freezes the HDD at the least jostle, and that may have disrupted the recording.

The angle of view really isn’t nearly wide enough.  I had envisioned a complete 360 view, or at least a forward-facing 270.  A fisheye lens, perhaps from a peephole, would really improve the experience.  A taller pipe is an alternative solution, but even at 10′ there was excessive movement and too many close calls.

If you’ve ever driven a biiiig moving truck, you understand the sudden paranoia of low branches and powerlines.  The polecam comes with the same obsessive issues.  Every single power line looks like it’s going to catch the camera, and something quite unlike hilarity would ensue.

Overall, it was great fun to put together and added a little extra excitement to a long holiday in the boonies.  I’m planning an improved version to document my Rav4’s offroad adventures in the California wilderness, so stay tuned.