Thanks so much to all the team from Sparkmate. This was a much bigger project than they initially thought, so I'm really grateful that they put it all together!
By the way, as we build the products and companies for tomorrow's challenges, we're building the best, most fulfilling lives for engineers ❤️ if you like to move fast and build things, find and DM us ;)
I would imagine as an 8 tonne truck crashing into things is less of a concern for the truck than whatever it crashes into too. Might be a deliberate choice if you're designing something you want to treat brick walls like tissue paper.
I feel like backwards-facing seats are going to be common if/when we get cars designed to drive themselves. They might have this kind of screen for emergencies.
in a real armored tank sure and maybe car seats with hydraulics beneath them to counter even more disconnect from swaying of the vehicle a forward driving car already does this (with seats and insulation from the world) (watch?v=L_6SAsypMNM) just to pull off a non intuitive way of driving
I had the exact same thought. Cause when you're in a go kart your peripheral vision still feeds you data about the world around you and you know you're going backwards. Still, proof of concept. Plus the little puppet guy did say in the show that it takes some getting used to but after that it's fine.
I also wonder if doing some strategic arrangement of mirroring / not of the image (and modifying the steering accordingly) would make the inertia line up.
Might have been easier if you were in a visually sealed container -- the clues from your peripheral vision wouldn't have contradicted with what you saw on the screen. I love how you always come up with great ideas for videos! Another winner!
I was wondering about this. Obviously you would still feel that it's going wrong, but sight is the main sense for most people. Maybe with VR goggles with would be perfectly doable, just with extra car sickness?
I would like to see this driven by an experienced IFR flying instructor, used to flying in in cloud, seeing nothing outside, relying only on cockpit instruments, and UTTERLY disregarding any motion sensations, like his life depends on it. Because it does. Brilliant demonstration, thank you!!
“We started to write explanations in the scripts, but then of course, I realised that not everybody would see that episode. If we put it in, say five times, it would become boring, and if we only put it in once, a lot of people wouldn’t know, and it was something I totally regretted doing.” - Gerry Anderson on the SPV’s rear-facing seat.
@@Moobeus To elaborate what Tom said: In any hard stop or crash, any occupants are thrown forwards under their own inertia. Stopping them requires an equally hard deceleration. It's well understood that humans tolerate forces directed from front to back - "Eyes in" forces. Flipping the occupants around thus means in an impact, everyone is thrown *into* the already padded seat. This principle is the reason many models of child car seats face backwards, even though it makes them trickier to fit, and unable to use the existing seatbelts as part of their restraints.
Always glad to see someone else who grew up watching Gerry Anderson shows. To give you a little background, Gerry wanted to put in the rear facing thing based on the studies at the time of it being safer and less likely for people to get injured in a crash. He later hated it because it meant he had to throw in a line every few episodes to explain it. Which is why you get characters in an SPV crash saying "I'm fine! The rear-facing seat saved me!"
great thing about this video besides the interesting concept is that hopefully it will intrigue people about Gerry Anderson shows and its weird, fascinating and batshit insane concepts. Love Anderson's shows like Terrahawks, Thunderbirds, Stingray and UFO, they're fantastic sci-fi shows, really underrated and not talked about as much. I think some of his ideas definitely definitely stand amongst other sci-fi shows like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek.
As Tom points out, yes, it's entirely true. Rear-facing seats are FAR safer in any crash or hard stop. It's just been impractical to implement, even for passenger seating.
I think the only thing he ought to regret is that he worried so much about explaining it, which led to him throwing in those lines. He could've just not. Less is more.
The human brain is quite adaptable, so with enough training someone could probably be really effective driving like this, and do whatever crazy maneuvers the action scenes require. The hard part might be their commute home from work in their ordinary forward driving car.
Fun fact, this is part of the reason why instrument flight (flying through clouds, etc., where you have no visual reference) requires a separate rating. The feeling of what's going on outside you can very easily throw off what you think is happening and lead you to put in very wrong inputs, which in a plane, can be a fatal mistake. Instrument rated pilots need to learn how to ignore those extra inputs your body is used to seeing and fly solely by instrument. The University of Illinois did a study testing flight into clouds with otherwise-qualified but not instrument rated pilots and asked them to do a 180 degree turn after entering the cloud (to get back out). On average, they lost control in 178 seconds.
Yes very true, there is though a small difference, in IMC there are no visual references, but Tom had to ignore those very visual clues that might save a disoriented pilot because he could still see out the side. I would be interested to see a return to this with an enlosed cockpit:)
I assume the University of Illinois had safety features for the study, and I also find the 2 unit difference between how many degrees the pilots are turning and the average length of time they remained in control for interesting
I think part of the problem is that it was quite open, so you're more aware of the real world going the wrong way. If it was like an SPV you would have been more enclosed and your brain would be less distracted.
This is in the mbt 70, where the driver is inside the turret with the rest of crew, driving with a screen. Even then, the testing drivers always got motion sick.
I think a truer test would involve having no exterior sightlines at all. So a completely enclosed cockpit of sorts. As it is, your peripheral vision is making you think you're driving a car in reverse, so if you're at all used to driving, I imagine you'll more easily fall back into the pattern of turning left for right and vice versa.
Most definitely. At that point the only problem would be the forces pushing you into the wrong direction, which would still be incredibly confusing. You’re used to pulling your weight towards the turn, but you’d have to push it in this case.
@@whatsadog2445 That is what was weird with a three-wheel e-bike (two rear wheels) - or as some people tell me, motorcycle with a sidecar -- you kinda have to lean into the turn the wrong way compared to normal two-wheeled things. Takes a bit getting used to.
I remember once we were driving back from the mountains and being in the passenger seat, I had the luxury of being able to close my eyes and just experience the ride from the forces. I was kinda surprised to discover that I could trick my mind into thinking we were driving backwards, since my eyes weren't giving any conflicting information, and the forces from braking and accelerating were just as easily interpreted as the reverse in my head.
I've always really liked doing that, but I've never tried it backwards! I wonder what other things are possible, such as doing a mental map of the area or tricking yourself into taking another point of reference, such as a stationary car inside with a orbiting gravity emitter :)
@@atlas4733 there have been experiments with people wearing some special glasses that turned everything upside down. After a few days they reported that the world had "turned around" and they once again saw top and bottom correctly. After the experiment was finished and they wore no more glasses, they had the same problems again until a few days later their vision turned back to "normal" again. i think that the background to do these tests was that in reality the lenses in eyes turn the picture upside down on the retina and our brain has learned to see top and bottom correctly. ps1: concentrating on the screen might help to adjust to driving backwards if you don't see conflicting info through windows. but the bigger problem might be to also adjust your sense of balance and acceleration (mostly the sideway acceleration in curves) with this. ps2: there are trains which can be driven forwards (normal way) in one direction, but to drive in the opposite direction there is a second "driver's cab" at the other end. of course the train driver sees the landscape normally when doing so. but what about the train driving backwards (reversing, relative to either of these directions)? do they do it like in a car (with "rear view mirrors/camera") or do they have some additional/duplicate controls and seats that are "turned around" ?
@@petertaylor4980 same here except I have only experienced sitting backwards in a car on flat roads but I have experienced sitting backwards on a ferry in really rough weather and that was terrible.
I think the biggest difference between this model and the one in the show: you could see the outside in this model, while in the SPV there was only a tiiiiny window showing the outside world. That of course minimizes the cognitive dissonance dramatically in my opinion.
I wager that it's not his visual system that's messing with him, it's the fact that steering "feels" backwards. you feel G forces when you steer. if you steer left, you get pushed into the right of your seat, because the seat is pushing you around the turn. when you're backwards, the feeling is backwards. if you steer left you feel that your body is turning right, per your inner ear. whether you're blinded to the outside world or not its still gonna feel like the wheel is hooked up backwards. An easy solution is to mirror the image on the monitor.
Honestly, I feel that if a person drove this way all the time, even the "backwards" sensory perception would soon feel perfectly normal. Just like how a standard driver now has no problem looking in their rearview mirror and comprehending how the "backwards" view applies to their vehicle and surroundings. Really, it's just what you're used to!
Actually, reversing is notoriously difficult by mirrors alone. This makes me wonder if they considered mirroring the view to match how a mirror would look.
@@bobafettjr85 On straight lines, it's not too bad. But even after driving around 120k miles in the last couple of years, I still struggle with the dimensions of the car when reversing. So like parallel parking? That's just not happening. And if I have to go down a road with anything more than a small curve, I'll much rather take a three, seven, even eleven point turn to avoid driving backwards.
@@ShroudedWolf51 If I can look over my shoulder, I could drive forever backwards, but I also have probably well over 100 miles of downhill skiing in reverse, so I guess practice makes perfect.
It’s funny how in making this the latency was one of the biggest challenges, as in the time of the show with analog cameras and monitors this would’ve been a total non-issue
@@RavenAdam I wouldn't think so we figured out low latency controllers a while ago. Digital cameras need to push a lot of data that makes it hard to work with
My thoughts exactly! Why they didn't just use a direct camera feed instead of encoding it, sending it over a tiny network then decoding it again is beyond me. Perhaps not a great advert in that it demonstrates they overthink things and always look to the future instead of taking the best things from the past.
@@cheaterman49 nope, it actually is easy. The thing Is that they wanted to use video game controllers and robotics, if they used direct steering and analog cameras which are still being sold, they wouldn't have an issue. Maybe safety was something they wanted to tackle and they wanted to have remote control??
Oh Tom, you've opened a can of worms with this one....My favourite childhood show of all time (I'm 66 now). The cameraman on a skateboard, priceless. Thanks for the smiles.
It was a super cool project to make! Lot of technical challenges, but nothing is too big for the Sparkmates To add a bit of Spice we built it in collaboration with two of our teams: Hong Kong for the software and Paris for the hardware 🇭🇰❤🇫🇷. Thanks Tom for the opportunity and THANK YOU THE SPARKMATES for being that CRAZY!
Travail absolument fantastique, tellement ingénieusement cool! I loved Captain Scarlet from childhood and thank you for helping make this a reality. It also definitely answers the question "is it possible?" Outstanding. The only problem now is I want one ;-)
For an extremely lo-fi version of this sort of effect, try walking whilst holding a full length mirror in front of you at arm's length. It's my favourite bit of moving house.
One of the things that I remember from China was the huge numbers of older Chinese walking backwards in the parks. From what I understood, it was meant to sort of balance out the muscles. I think that one could probably make a periscope to show you what's behind you without having to hold a mirror though.
This reminds me of when people wear goggles that flip their vision, and for a few days they run into things, but eventually their brain adjusts and they move around normally… until they take the goggles off again.
@@jama211 Probably as they've had a lifetime seeing the world the "right way up". I wonder how quickly they'd adjust if the wore the upsidedown goggles for their whole life before taking them off.
@@windroid_user the most famous is likely the innsbruck experiments i the 1880s i think it was, it takes about 48 hours to start to adjust and a few of weeks to fully adjust. Then again when you remove them.
@@windroid_user we did this in school. They were simple plastic prisms taped to a glasses frame. You can build them for a few tens of Euro's. And probably buy them on Amazon or Ali.
I love the fact that they made up a "fun" reason for using a controller instead of a steering wheel, when they probably just didn't have the space to put it in safely
I think it was just a disconnect in intent. In their scrapped ideas they also shown their concept of a drone acting as a third person view, lke GTA. Their intent was to mimic video game driving while Tom wanted it to simply be driving a car while backwards.
@@braydencluff4520 A lot of racing wheel and pedal set ups have been made for video games and people do play with them. Also been a lot of arcade games where you are on a bike, snowmobile, truck, etc. and don't have the console controller. And people have played those arcade games and others with racing wheel and pedals for decades.
A suggestion for the team from sparkmate, if they need a low latency video feed for a future project there are 3 ways to do it easily: Pro video gear running over SDI will be within about 2 frames of real time, analogue video will be zerom latency (this is used in live musicals for the conductor and cast to see each other and stay in musical time), or DJI have an off the shelf, digital FPV video system that has very low latency and runs into a set of goggles. Fantastic project and love the reactions. Get Destin from smarter every day to drive it!
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They could also use a mirror? Btw, analogue doesn't have zero latency. Just close enough to zero to not matter.
@@ahmedkamalhasin2070, the steering has been inverted to match up to the backwards view. If a mirror was used, the steering could be restored to normal and Tom would have no confusion between right and left, as it would be exactly like reversing in a normal car.
honestly, the vr headset would probably reduce the "everything other than the screen going backwards" simptoms, you'd still feel the acceleration but, if the latency being such a problem, it would end up like a hybrid with that delayed car video you did with william osman and michael reeves
I remember reading somewhere that the inspiration was from how seats were aligned on transport planes landing on aircraft carriers, when the arresting wire slowed the plane, you were pushed "back" into the seat cushions instead of needing something to stop whiplash. Captain Scarlet ftw!
Also studies for general aviation - as far as I know the reasons that seats are still forward is comfort and safety during takeoff and ascent, and admission of prior liability for people injured or killed during accidents who would have been saved by rear-facing seats.
I can't help but wonder if the reason it was so difficult for you to focus, is if it was because you could still see the outside world in your peripheral vision, rather than being fully enclosed in the vehicle like in the TV show? Would have been easier if they had also built you in an enclosure so you couldn't see outside the vehicle?
I think it may help but unlike playing a game, your body would still feel the car turning opposite and the g forces applying contrary to the screen so it would still be difficult.
@@TheShinyShow As long as you're not prone to motion sickness that part is easily retrained by doing laps. Keeping your eyes and mind focused on the screen when there is so much more visual input telling you you're going backwards is a lot harder.
I was thinking about that too. However, sensing accelleration and motion alone will probably also throw you off. Still, I think you will get used to it similarly to the turning room/artificial gravity lab and the bike that turns into the wrong direction.
@@TheShinyShow That's actually exactly like driving in a racing sim with a VR headset. Every VR sim racer has experienced the dizziness from your eyes telling you that you're moving while your body is telling you that you're not, but that can easily be overcome by simply practicing so your brain gets used to it.
Also, it's a very small vehicle that really lets you "feel" the motion. I wonder if it would be easier in something massive where you don't feel it rock and move as much.
This reminds me a lot of the "reverse handlebar bike" which is rigged to steer the opposite direction from the turn. It's amazing how quickly a brain can adjust to "different" input-output modes with a little bit of practice. Like you, the biggest issue I have with driving games is the lack of peripheral vision.
The steering coming from the "front" wheels (in the direction of motion) has to be the most confusing. If the rear wheels steered it would be like backing up with a car's reverse camera, which is intuitive in a normal car.
I have driven a car rigged like that in an event site once, it required some getting used to but one colleague managed to take the lap in record time, like 1/3 the rest of us, taking the turns skidding and he said his secret was to always turning the wheels slightly back and forth because the feedback from that wheel motion kept the brain focused on the difference, the same time you start keeping the wheel still, once you start turning again in learnt behavior kicked in and you started to drive as if it was a normal car. But I guess that if you always drive such a car you will end up learning new reactions. I also think that an enclosed drive space where you do not see the surroundings except through the screen would make it easier since you get no conflicting visual feedback.
I also had that same question watching the Captain Scarlet pilot in the 90s and it's good to finally have an answer. Thanks, Tom and Sparkmate! The use of the transition was just such a nice touch too, I'm glad you did it!
When Tom actually tests this vehicle on the track, this strongly reminds me of the German TV-Show "Schlag den Raab", where in every episode the host an the candidate had to drive a race on a vessel they (most probably) have never used before. The backwards-car would have been the perfect vehicle for this event, and I am quite convinced Stefan Raab would have mastered it after a few minutes.
@@MattTheSpratt Top Gear got close in some ways. It was more about cars in general, but every dang episode they found something weird or crazy to do with a vehicle they hadn't tested yet.
Do not underestimate Captain Scarlet. After Thunderbirds, it’s the most successful Gerry Anderson show. It also plays a vital part in British TV history.
Ohh, did he make thunderbirds too? I haven’t heard of the show in this video before but I did watch thunderbirds as a kid! I got to visit the set for the new thunderbirds tv show a couple years ago which was cool.
@@rachelcookie321 Thunderbirds, Stingray, Joe 90, UFO, Space: 1999, Terrahawks… Gerry made many sci-fi shows. And thanks to his son Jamie, the legacy keeps going.
@@rachelcookie321 Never knew that as well ;) I think Captain Scarlet never made it to Dutch television, as I only recall the Thunderbirds, which was just way cool as well. Maybe it has been broadcast here, but I just don't know. The 'illegal' REM-island TV broadcasts could probably have shown them, but really, not sure.
Wow! You've answered the question I've had since I watched Captain Scarlet as a kid in the 70s. Me and my brother tried to do the same with a pedal car when we were young and kept crashing!!
I love that, while they’re introducing the kart to Tom, there’s just casually a guy on crutches in the background, and it’s not clear whether it’s related or not 😂
I think this is the only Tom Scott video where I've actually been worried for him. Even the tightroping, cave climbing, and other adventures didn't scare me as much as this one did!
Reminds me of Destin from Smarter Everyday's reverse bicycle. Seems to me that if you learned to drive like this you could get really competent, but then have a hard time re-learning to drive normally.
The same notion occurred to me. It's impractical, but it would be cool to see people who get very good at driving this or riding that bike and do like racing and tricks. It would suck though if you were driving normally and your brain flipped and you had an accident because you lefted when you should have righted.
Sort of. I think the backwards brain bike is harder For this in order to turn left, you turn left. In the backwards bike, to turn left you turn right (and have to lean left)
For anyone interested in new episodes of Captain Scarlet: the company Big Finish have made a couple of full cast Audio Dramas based on the original series. There are even 2 free episodes to check it out!
The most dangerous moment was not when you were on the track, it was when you got off it and into your own car and started driving, as you had practically unlearned how to drive. :D
When I watched the show on the B&W TV, I could make out the strings. I also remember the die cast model I had, with it's 9 axles : 5 outer wheels and 4 inner wheels plus the tracks on the back. It was, by far, the heaviest, and biggest, die cast model that I ever had.
I imagine the most confusing thing is that intuitively this feels like looking into your rearview mirror, and when going in reverse you right is left and left is right.
I'm so glad kids these days are growing up with TV shows that have cool action scenes, explosions, _and_ coherent plots. (Not all of them, of course, but it's nice that there are some that get all three.)
Just in time for cable to become irrelevant and most kids to spend the majority of their time watching youtube and social media creators with none of the above (e.g. Ryan's Toy Review).
yup - even if all they did was a full motion driving sim, it would have been a good show case of who they are and what they do. But they build a whole vehicle - so going for the easiest solution is not their thing.
Great idea. Might have been easier with the sides filled in. Would have been spectacular if filmed at Slough Trading Estate where Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and Stingray were filmed! 😊
I wanted something like this when I was younger. Was not influenced by any show or anything, just sat in the bus backwards once and thought "why is this not the standard everywhere?". Because in a crash, there is no way you would fly out the window, and instead of 2 belts catching your whole weight, it would instead be distributed across the whole seat.
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That's another explanation of why safety theater in airplanes is really just that: theater. If they really cared about safety, they'd fly you in windowless planes facing backwards. (Just like the military does. Because their passengers don't have a right to complain, and they have a higher than average chance to get involved in dangerous situations.)
So as for the bonus question: What if you were to invert the right/left control inputs, would that mean the learning curve is gone, or would your physical/feeling-based feedback still confuse you?
@@danb4275 I think driving with any sort of mirrored or rotated view could be catastrophic when looking forward. The only reason it's acceptable when looking backwards is because you (usually) aren't moving in that direction and therefore have a much lower risk of hitting anything based on an incorrect response to what you're seeing.
I was a huge Captain Scarlet fan, and loved the models. I didn’t remember that feature of driving, but I’d imagine it would become second nature quickly.
I watched as a child and I remember the driving backwards clearly. I also remember a kid turning in an essay verbatim of the show and getting a prize; that still irks me to this day... it's been 42 years!
I watched all of Gerry Anderson's supermarionation series and Captain Scarlet was definitely a favourite. Can't remember any of the plots like in Thunderbirds by the models were amazing. Also very progressive for the time with multiracial female fighter pilots.
As a child of the 70’s living in England and watching all the Anderson supermarionation shows, this was brilliant! You have to keep the seven boom jump cut! 🇬🇧👍🏻😁
@@nymalous3428 Right?! If they didn't try those permutations, the experiment is incomplete. It's like when you're trying to remember a song, and you can't remember one little piece of it. It's hard to let go. It's an incomplete gestalt. I mean, maybe they did, and he just didn't address it, but I'd like to know.
I was thinking the same. I can reverse quite well in a car, whether I am using the mirrors or looking over my shoulder. I never mistake left or right, because the top of the steering wheel will still move in the direction I am turning. But in his setup it is way more difficult. He isn't mistaking going forward or going backwards, but mixes up left and right because it is the other way around.
1:53 absolutely possible, the Soviets built many light tanks that could float! They're very cool :D I think another factor to this thing being hard to drive is the fact that it has wind inside, and you also have great sight. The vehicle this is based on barely has windows and the driver is truly enclosed, very different!
@@john_michael_white It would actually only have to displace 8 cubic meters of water to do that actually. I imagine as long as it is airtight even the design from the show ought to be just fine to float.
@@john_michael_white Even using modest calculations, it should easily float. The total estimated volume is from 900 to 1600 cu ft. There should be no problem. Tanks float all the time and are much heavier.
So why isn't standard in buses, where every passenger is facing backwards while the driver is facing forward, the only time you see backwards seats in a bus is for space optimization and only in few seats.
@@Larroseba many ppl hate backwards-facing seats with a vengeance. Some suffer from motion sickness due to the mismatched directional hints; others just aren't used to them
@@blahza12345 Mhm i personally avoid rear facing seats for only one reason: i can't see my stop coming up unless i know the route perfectly and end up missing it. So maybe you can count that among the reasons rear facing seats on a bus aren't preferred. Besides, crash safety is just not a concern with a bus, because they are lightweight flimsy structures sitting atop a lot of frame mass, you aren't getting out of a serious enough crash alive no matter which way you're around. In fact it's difficult to even imagine a circumstance under which rear facing seat is safer in these.
What a brilliant idea! I’m old enough to have watched the original run of Captain Scarlet. As a child I never registered that it was remotely odd to drive facing backward, I couldn’t drive, back then.
Didn't Thunderbirds also have that pink limo with four front wheels? I think Gerry Anderson was a bit of a herbalist back in the day, smoking the electric lettuce.
listening to Tom read off the fictional specifications, it strikes me that the fictional vehicle was somewhat lighter than I expected, considering that it fills a role some where between an armoured car and a tank
Check out the video named something like Century 21 Tech Talk - SPV if you’d care to know more. It’s part of a series discussing the traits of many of the vehicles from Gerry Anderson’s series over the years.
Probably a little easier to see if the file's on your computer or something than if it went through UA-cam streaming compression and then probably came out at a lower resolution than the file on Tom's computer.
I haven’t watched the HD scans of Scarlet, but I have watched the Thunderbirds ones, and the visibility of the strings depends highly on lighting and background colour. But there are times when they’re glaringly obvious. (Though much more obvious to me, which I found surprising, was how the scale of the props is more self evident - eg a 3" dictation tape recorder masquerading as a large computer tape drive, or “grain of wheat” lightbulbs acting as large warning lights on the wall.)
Thank you because I had forgotten that as a child I fantasized about this idea thinking it would eventually replace seat belts, and I didn't know I had had this itch for over 30 years
As someone else who watched Gerry Anderson shows as a kid, I can confirm that this is sick and those transitions gave me some serious nostalgia. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to have to binge Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and Stingray...
As someone married to a CPST (Child Passenger Safety Technician, aka child carseat tech), I can vouch for just how much driving facing backwards is safer. Learning to drive on a monitor, even with the opposite g forces, would be simple, just take time. We got used to driving forward after all. Closing in the cabin so that you can't see the outside world except for the screens would help with acclimating to it. The major problem would be making sure the vehicle is safe when it's not operating at 100%. If the screens glitch and such. I wonder if you could achieve something similar with mirrors, which would solve this issue as well as the latency one.
@@Zizwizwee My lesson for today: refresh a tab that's been sitting a while before commenting. I'd say 'great minds' but I don't think I can make that claim right now...
This whole time I was thinking “I bet that handwavey “eh, you get used to it” line has more truth behind it than Tom expected”. With Tom’s increased proficiency on the track after an afternoon of practice, I fully believe a few months’ intensive training would be more than enough to pull-off the driving they do in the show. After all, they have to be specially rated, a regular driving license doesn’t cover an SPV! It’s going to be more involved training than that required to drive a large lorry or bus, but it seems eminently doable by a committed military with secret vehicle caches!
In the , uh, "source material", they are completely enclosed with the only visual signals being from the monitor. Do you think that would have improved your skill or the time to learn? Also, did you have to re-adjust getting back into the car later??
Captain Blue says in the show that he *only* drives the SPV. I assume that's because the writers realised his brain would have to be rewired a certain amount and it would make normal driving difficult.
I would have loved to see Tom's perspective while driving, just to get an idea of what it feels like to sit in this car. With the screen in the middle, while the landscape passes you in the wrong direction... Still a very cool idea and a great watch!
I imagine it would be no different from what you'd expect. Doesn't need a pov shot because it wouldn't do justice to the experience without peripheral vision and the actual process of driving the kart.
that could probably be fixed with more screens that let you look around as if you were facing forwards though it doesnt fix the accelleration feeling off...but is suspect thats something you could get used to
I think that maybe mirroring the video feed or reversing the direction of the controller/wheel would have made driving backwards easier. That way your brain is doing things the way you see it, but the result is appropriate for reality.
Also if you mirror the feed, mechanical steering becomes way easier. All you need to do is figure out how to get the steering column behind the seat then put the wheel on the opposite side.
It’s definitely easier with a mirrored screen so it still feels like you’re driving normally. I haven’t tried it in real life, in games it can work. It would still feel weird, like sitting backwards on a train, but it would be easier.
To be clear, the "safer" part isn't the question that was answered. I will say that driving in the dark and without passengers takes away 2 very large variables. Well done!
For the camera, you could use an FPV camera system like those used in FPV racing drones. Very low latency and high picture quality if using one of the digital variants (like DJI or newly announced Walksnail/Fatshark components). Simple to set up and implement, and can utilize the "VR" style goggles or a screen. Cheers!
Agree. They made this 10 times harder than they needed to. Some really bad ideas went into building this vehicle, not the least of which was a hand brake from the ceiling.
@@jaydogg9933 I assume that if you were to do that, then you'd be fighting the latency of your input being slower than whats on screen. I'd think that there has to be some validation of latency from both sides to make sure everything goes well
@@jaydogg9933 HDMI isn't a pure video signal, and neither is DisplayPort. I don't think anything is, these days. If I was building this, I'd be looking into the technology of the display panel itself and seeing if I could get data from the camera's CCD rather than trying to use a whole, unhacked monitor. It would not be trivial though; the data rate of modern hardware is immense. It might simply be impossible to send data through a cable that fast. As for sending it in analog form, I've had trouble getting a clean display in 1920x1080 over VGA. "4k" is 4 times that many pixels. ... And now I'm laughing because I've remembered cables themselves have a delay line effect. Inductance along the length of the cable (as weak as it is) combines with capacitance between signal and ground (or signal and inverted signal) to delay the signal. There's also a risk of smearing the signal if you don't match impedances correctly. The resolution could be lowered, but then the question becomes, "Can you drive backward _with a lower-quality display?"_ :)
This was my favourite Tv programme as a kid. There was a Christmas annual that had full schematics for all the vehicles and I would spend hours looking at them.
I'd be curious to see how much your driving improves if you had blinders covering your peripheral vision. Then you'd only have the conflict between what you see and the acceleration your body is experiencing
CAPTAIN SCARLET! I rewatched the whole thing a few years back when I was off work sick and I still love it, plot holes be damned. This is so much fun 😂
This is really weird! It's easy to say 'just look at the screen' but in reality, especially for those who are used to driving, because you're moving backwards and you KNOW you are, to go around a right turn you would normally need to turn the wheel to the left (when reversing), but you actually need to turn to the right because the car isn't ACTUALLY going backwards!
8:00 I think part of the navigation is not done by sight, but by sense of motion/balance. Once you get up to speed, that switch happens. Or the motion sense becomes dominant. Hence that time you turned the wrong way. But one bigger issue was that you saw too much of the world and the screen was wrongly centered. The original had: 1. A screen directly in front of the seat, not a shared one for both seats 2. A small window a 90° turn away from the screen, so peripheral vision could not get in the way 3. Of course they also had training to re-allign the sense of motion navigation
What an awesome make-it-real project! I wonder if thinking about what the controls differently would help. As in, turning the wheel points the back of the vehicle in the same direction. Or, point the wheel away from the corner. Conceiving of the controls in a way other than "It's the same but I'm backwards" may help gain an intuitive use of them more quickly. Thanks for sharing, keep up the great work!
Thanks so much to all the team from Sparkmate. This was a much bigger project than they initially thought, so I'm really grateful that they put it all together!
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We are absolutely thrilled to have made this crazy buggy with you mate! Let's do it again! What should we build next? 🚀
By the way, as we build the products and companies for tomorrow's challenges, we're building the best, most fulfilling lives for engineers ❤️ if you like to move fast and build things, find and DM us ;)
Hey its the people in the video!
@@sparkmate looking at the quality of the product it sure looks like you guys have professionals
What happened to the cart do you still have it?
You guys did an amazing job, and are very generous with your time. Good stuff from some good people!
"You'll be facing backwards because it's safer during the crashes"
"How often will there be crashes?"
"Very often, it's tricky to drive backwards"
I would imagine as an 8 tonne truck crashing into things is less of a concern for the truck than whatever it crashes into too.
Might be a deliberate choice if you're designing something you want to treat brick walls like tissue paper.
@@scragar That's likely an intentional design for it to be a very quick and heavy brick
Goddamn that's funny.
I feel like backwards-facing seats are going to be common if/when we get cars designed to drive themselves. They might have this kind of screen for emergencies.
made my day 😆
The fact that Tom used a transition like the ones in the show at 9:12 was such a great detail.
He used one earlier as well
3:28 to be exact
I wonder if the disorienting effect would be smaller if you were completely enclosed like the show's vehicle.
I had the same thought. I would imagine it would cut out the the distractions from the outside world
I was thinking the same, I'm guessing it will be, even though G-forces are still applied "incorrectly"
in a real armored tank sure and maybe car seats with hydraulics beneath them to counter even more disconnect from swaying of the vehicle
a forward driving car already does this (with seats and insulation from the world) (watch?v=L_6SAsypMNM)
just to pull off a non intuitive way of driving
I had the exact same thought. Cause when you're in a go kart your peripheral vision still feeds you data about the world around you and you know you're going backwards.
Still, proof of concept.
Plus the little puppet guy did say in the show that it takes some getting used to but after that it's fine.
I also wonder if doing some strategic arrangement of mirroring / not of the image (and modifying the steering accordingly) would make the inertia line up.
Tom veering off the road and managing to pass between two metal posts is amazing.
Also shoutout to the cameraman skateboarding alongside
Lucky is what it was
how is this amazing. u got the reason why that dude didn't sit next to him on the cart track. RIP.
r/PraiseTheCameraMan
@@_modiX You mean the cart track with no cars or kerbs or metal posts and walled with tires?
Seems the reason was it wasnt necessary.
Might have been easier if you were in a visually sealed container -- the clues from your peripheral vision wouldn't have contradicted with what you saw on the screen. I love how you always come up with great ideas for videos! Another winner!
Then again, you moving the opposite direction through inertia would be strange to overcome.
I was wondering about this. Obviously you would still feel that it's going wrong, but sight is the main sense for most people. Maybe with VR goggles with would be perfectly doable, just with extra car sickness?
I would like to see this driven by an experienced IFR flying instructor, used to flying in in cloud, seeing nothing outside, relying only on cockpit instruments, and UTTERLY disregarding any motion sensations, like his life depends on it. Because it does.
Brilliant demonstration, thank you!!
Yes and do One with enclosure and 3 monitors, 3 HD cams, from ledt and right angle and the normal perspective. That could work i feel like
@@coryman125 have you never sat on a train where some of the seats face the opposite direction?
“We started to write explanations in the scripts, but then of course, I realised that not everybody would see that episode. If we put it in, say five times, it would become boring, and if we only put it in once, a lot of people wouldn’t know, and it was something I totally regretted doing.” - Gerry Anderson on the SPV’s rear-facing seat.
What is the explanation? 😂
@@Moobeusdid you pay attention to the video
@@Moobeus To elaborate what Tom said: In any hard stop or crash, any occupants are thrown forwards under their own inertia. Stopping them requires an equally hard deceleration.
It's well understood that humans tolerate forces directed from front to back - "Eyes in" forces. Flipping the occupants around thus means in an impact, everyone is thrown *into* the already padded seat.
This principle is the reason many models of child car seats face backwards, even though it makes them trickier to fit, and unable to use the existing seatbelts as part of their restraints.
@@watchm4ker wow awesome, thanks for that explanation!
It's just like playing a racing game except you can crash and burn at any moment
And with nicer graphics. Realism.
Literally how I drive at all times
No, you're safer because you're backwards.
So exactly like a racing game
@@umchoyka damnit beat me to it xD
Always glad to see someone else who grew up watching Gerry Anderson shows. To give you a little background, Gerry wanted to put in the rear facing thing based on the studies at the time of it being safer and less likely for people to get injured in a crash. He later hated it because it meant he had to throw in a line every few episodes to explain it. Which is why you get characters in an SPV crash saying "I'm fine! The rear-facing seat saved me!"
Same here
I just assumed they built the set piece wrong and didn’t have time to fix it so they rolled with the it ha.
great thing about this video besides the interesting concept is that hopefully it will intrigue people about Gerry Anderson shows and its weird, fascinating and batshit insane concepts. Love Anderson's shows like Terrahawks, Thunderbirds, Stingray and UFO, they're fantastic sci-fi shows, really underrated and not talked about as much. I think some of his ideas definitely definitely stand amongst other sci-fi shows like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek.
As Tom points out, yes, it's entirely true. Rear-facing seats are FAR safer in any crash or hard stop. It's just been impractical to implement, even for passenger seating.
I think the only thing he ought to regret is that he worried so much about explaining it, which led to him throwing in those lines. He could've just not. Less is more.
The human brain is quite adaptable, so with enough training someone could probably be really effective driving like this, and do whatever crazy maneuvers the action scenes require. The hard part might be their commute home from work in their ordinary forward driving car.
Yes like the smarter every day guy who rode a reverse steering bycycle and couldn't ride normal cycle anymore
Some forklift drivers sit sideways and get very, very proficient driving like that
@@pianissimo7121 It's nothing like that at all.
@@arrgghh1555 That was just an example on how extremely good our brain is at getting used to/ adapting to different conditions.
@@pianissimo7121 i thought of the same thing
Fun fact, this is part of the reason why instrument flight (flying through clouds, etc., where you have no visual reference) requires a separate rating. The feeling of what's going on outside you can very easily throw off what you think is happening and lead you to put in very wrong inputs, which in a plane, can be a fatal mistake. Instrument rated pilots need to learn how to ignore those extra inputs your body is used to seeing and fly solely by instrument.
The University of Illinois did a study testing flight into clouds with otherwise-qualified but not instrument rated pilots and asked them to do a 180 degree turn after entering the cloud (to get back out). On average, they lost control in 178 seconds.
Drone pilots who learned entirely on the ground apparently score higher on average than traditionally trained pilots for the same reasons
Yes very true, there is though a small difference, in IMC there are no visual references, but Tom had to ignore those very visual clues that might save a disoriented pilot because he could still see out the side. I would be interested to see a return to this with an enlosed cockpit:)
Would love to see an instrument certified pilot try to drive this
I assume the University of Illinois had safety features for the study, and I also find the 2 unit difference between how many degrees the pilots are turning and the average length of time they remained in control for interesting
Did anyone survive?
I think part of the problem is that it was quite open, so you're more aware of the real world going the wrong way. If it was like an SPV you would have been more enclosed and your brain would be less distracted.
I was thinking the same thing.
The driver is still going to get messed up vestibular signals. Motion sickness is guaranteed.
This is in the mbt 70, where the driver is inside the turret with the rest of crew, driving with a screen. Even then, the testing drivers always got motion sick.
I think a truer test would involve having no exterior sightlines at all. So a completely enclosed cockpit of sorts. As it is, your peripheral vision is making you think you're driving a car in reverse, so if you're at all used to driving, I imagine you'll more easily fall back into the pattern of turning left for right and vice versa.
Most definitely. At that point the only problem would be the forces pushing you into the wrong direction, which would still be incredibly confusing. You’re used to pulling your weight towards the turn, but you’d have to push it in this case.
@@whatsadog2445 That is what was weird with a three-wheel e-bike (two rear wheels) - or as some people tell me, motorcycle with a sidecar -- you kinda have to lean into the turn the wrong way compared to normal two-wheeled things. Takes a bit getting used to.
@@computer_toucher a tricycle?
There was a quick shot of someone driving in vr goggles. That would have been an interesting test
Being blinkered probably would help a lot, but you'd need a lot more screens then, that allow you to look left and right.
I remember once we were driving back from the mountains and being in the passenger seat, I had the luxury of being able to close my eyes and just experience the ride from the forces. I was kinda surprised to discover that I could trick my mind into thinking we were driving backwards, since my eyes weren't giving any conflicting information, and the forces from braking and accelerating were just as easily interpreted as the reverse in my head.
My experience of being a passenger in a backwards-facing seat is that I'm fine on level road but get motion-sick in hilly areas.
@@petertaylor4980 hm my brain is probbaly trained for this then cause we have a lot of shitty roads lmao
I've always really liked doing that, but I've never tried it backwards! I wonder what other things are possible, such as doing a mental map of the area or tricking yourself into taking another point of reference, such as a stationary car inside with a orbiting gravity emitter :)
@@atlas4733 there have been experiments with people wearing some special glasses that turned everything upside down. After a few days they reported that the world had "turned around" and they once again saw top and bottom correctly. After the experiment was finished and they wore no more glasses, they had the same problems again until a few days later their vision turned back to "normal" again.
i think that the background to do these tests was that in reality the lenses in eyes turn the picture upside down on the retina and our brain has learned to see top and bottom correctly.
ps1: concentrating on the screen might help to adjust to driving backwards if you don't see conflicting info through windows. but the bigger problem might be to also adjust your sense of balance and acceleration (mostly the sideway acceleration in curves) with this.
ps2: there are trains which can be driven forwards (normal way) in one direction, but to drive in the opposite direction there is a second "driver's cab" at the other end. of course the train driver sees the landscape normally when doing so. but what about the train driving backwards (reversing, relative to either of these directions)? do they do it like in a car (with "rear view mirrors/camera") or do they have some additional/duplicate controls and seats that are "turned around" ?
@@petertaylor4980 same here except I have only experienced sitting backwards in a car on flat roads but I have experienced sitting backwards on a ferry in really rough weather and that was terrible.
I LOVE the cameraman on a skateboard that's amazing.
apparently it's more common than you think, i've started noticing it a lot more in other videos
That's crazy common, occasionally the cameramen are doing something more interesting to get the shot than the shot they're taking :L
My friend runs a film company, he films on Inline skates 👍
love the touch of actually having scene transitions like in the show! this was a very fun video
We need Tom to always use the Captain Scarlett transitions from now on.
Tom Scarlett!!
I think the biggest difference between this model and the one in the show: you could see the outside in this model, while in the SPV there was only a tiiiiny window showing the outside world. That of course minimizes the cognitive dissonance dramatically in my opinion.
and that window was behind the line of sight.
Also the real one had a steering wheel....using a game controller adds a whole other variable and kind of leaves the original question unanswered.
I wager that it's not his visual system that's messing with him, it's the fact that steering "feels" backwards. you feel G forces when you steer. if you steer left, you get pushed into the right of your seat, because the seat is pushing you around the turn. when you're backwards, the feeling is backwards. if you steer left you feel that your body is turning right, per your inner ear. whether you're blinded to the outside world or not its still gonna feel like the wheel is hooked up backwards. An easy solution is to mirror the image on the monitor.
I'm not a specialist so I am likely wrong but I dont know if cognitive dissonance is used correctly here
@@ChadDidNothingWrong You watched the whole video right? They use a wheel
Honestly, I feel that if a person drove this way all the time, even the "backwards" sensory perception would soon feel perfectly normal. Just like how a standard driver now has no problem looking in their rearview mirror and comprehending how the "backwards" view applies to their vehicle and surroundings. Really, it's just what you're used to!
Actually, reversing is notoriously difficult by mirrors alone. This makes me wonder if they considered mirroring the view to match how a mirror would look.
@@ludvigericson6930 it is? I do that every day. I have a decently long driveway. I never got around to putting on a turnaround up by the garage.
@@bobafettjr85 On straight lines, it's not too bad. But even after driving around 120k miles in the last couple of years, I still struggle with the dimensions of the car when reversing. So like parallel parking? That's just not happening. And if I have to go down a road with anything more than a small curve, I'll much rather take a three, seven, even eleven point turn to avoid driving backwards.
Check the experiment of the upside-down glasses... The brain is amazing.
@@ShroudedWolf51 If I can look over my shoulder, I could drive forever backwards, but I also have probably well over 100 miles of downhill skiing in reverse, so I guess practice makes perfect.
Absolutely loved how they're talking about driving it and top speeds with a guy on *crutches* next to Tom. Inspiring
It’s funny how in making this the latency was one of the biggest challenges, as in the time of the show with analog cameras and monitors this would’ve been a total non-issue
@@RavenAdam I wouldn't think so we figured out low latency controllers a while ago. Digital cameras need to push a lot of data that makes it hard to work with
My thoughts exactly! Why they didn't just use a direct camera feed instead of encoding it, sending it over a tiny network then decoding it again is beyond me. Perhaps not a great advert in that it demonstrates they overthink things and always look to the future instead of taking the best things from the past.
@@C.I... It might not be that easy to work with analog nowadays :-)
@@cheaterman49 nope, it actually is easy. The thing Is that they wanted to use video game controllers and robotics, if they used direct steering and analog cameras which are still being sold, they wouldn't have an issue. Maybe safety was something they wanted to tackle and they wanted to have remote control??
@C. H. Probably because of concidering doing things like VR
Oh Tom, you've opened a can of worms with this one....My favourite childhood show of all time (I'm 66 now). The cameraman on a skateboard, priceless. Thanks for the smiles.
2025 will be a nice year for you sir
@@platypus420 🗿
Wow, you've even got the profile picture to show for it.
@@platypus420 🗿
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 Yes, I've used the Captain Scarlet profile pic for many years - a small tribute to a great (if slightly wooden) actor.
It was a super cool project to make! Lot of technical challenges, but nothing is too big for the Sparkmates To add a bit of Spice we built it in collaboration with two of our teams: Hong Kong for the software and Paris for the hardware 🇭🇰❤🇫🇷. Thanks Tom for the opportunity and THANK YOU THE SPARKMATES for being that CRAZY!
@Morgan, you have to tell people that you haven't broke your leg by testing the Buggy! 😂
@Sparkmate Who knows how I made that 😏
Travail absolument fantastique, tellement ingénieusement cool! I loved Captain Scarlet from childhood and thank you for helping make this a reality. It also definitely answers the question "is it possible?" Outstanding. The only problem now is I want one ;-)
@@ChristopherWoods haha if you want to try it I can see to get the Paris team to make you do a few runs with it ;)
Are you hiring? :)
For an extremely lo-fi version of this sort of effect, try walking whilst holding a full length mirror in front of you at arm's length. It's my favourite bit of moving house.
That's how youtubers walk everyday: holding their phones, watching the selfie-cam footage.
One of the things that I remember from China was the huge numbers of older Chinese walking backwards in the parks. From what I understood, it was meant to sort of balance out the muscles. I think that one could probably make a periscope to show you what's behind you without having to hold a mirror though.
If you have a car with a rearview camera and a long driveway, you can use that too.
This reminds me of when people wear goggles that flip their vision, and for a few days they run into things, but eventually their brain adjusts and they move around normally… until they take the goggles off again.
Though when they do take the goggles off they recovered quite quickly compared to putting them on!
@@jama211 Probably as they've had a lifetime seeing the world the "right way up".
I wonder how quickly they'd adjust if the wore the upsidedown goggles for their whole life before taking them off.
I need links folks
@@windroid_user the most famous is likely the innsbruck experiments i the 1880s i think it was, it takes about 48 hours to start to adjust and a few of weeks to fully adjust. Then again when you remove them.
@@windroid_user we did this in school. They were simple plastic prisms taped to a glasses frame. You can build them for a few tens of Euro's. And probably buy them on Amazon or Ali.
Tom scared that poor guy so much when he nearly crashed into that pole! 😂 Looks like no one wanted to ride with Tom after that incident ha ha.
This whole video was JUST an excuse to use that transition.
Oh, hi Taran! Didn't expect to see you here :)
Woah, getting a company to make a whole car with a purpose just to make a video with an effect from an old 60's cartoon? Absolute madlad ( ￣∇￣ﾉｼ
On a large enough monitor, the transition looks absolutely horrible btw, i was about to throw up.
@@SianaGearz just like how Tom described it
@@SianaGearz Do you have motion smoothing turned on? Is the GTG speed especially slow?
I love the fact that they made up a "fun" reason for using a controller instead of a steering wheel, when they probably just didn't have the space to put it in safely
I think it was just a disconnect in intent. In their scrapped ideas they also shown their concept of a drone acting as a third person view, lke GTA. Their intent was to mimic video game driving while Tom wanted it to simply be driving a car while backwards.
@@braydencluff4520 But it’s neither accurate to the brief nor what Tom is familiar with
@@braydencluff4520 Gamers have been driving with wheel/pedal for years too, that’s just what you use for driving games
@@braydencluff4520 A lot of racing wheel and pedal set ups have been made for video games and people do play with them. Also been a lot of arcade games where you are on a bike, snowmobile, truck, etc. and don't have the console controller. And people have played those arcade games and others with racing wheel and pedals for decades.
Nahh, reverse linkage would be a right pain. Simple as that.
That gaming gear clearly had quite a deadzone.
A suggestion for the team from sparkmate, if they need a low latency video feed for a future project there are 3 ways to do it easily: Pro video gear running over SDI will be within about 2 frames of real time, analogue video will be zerom latency (this is used in live musicals for the conductor and cast to see each other and stay in musical time), or DJI have an off the shelf, digital FPV video system that has very low latency and runs into a set of goggles.
Fantastic project and love the reactions. Get Destin from smarter every day to drive it!
They could also use a mirror?
Btw, analogue doesn't have zero latency. Just close enough to zero to not matter.
@ A mirror would give inverted view. You're natural steering inputs wouldn't work.
When you mentioned Destin, I remembered him trying to ride the bicycle with reverse steering.
@@ahmedkamalhasin2070, the steering has been inverted to match up to the backwards view. If a mirror was used, the steering could be restored to normal and Tom would have no confusion between right and left, as it would be exactly like reversing in a normal car.
@@JNCressey we would just insult our GPS then xD
honestly, the vr headset would probably reduce the "everything other than the screen going backwards" simptoms, you'd still feel the acceleration but, if the latency being such a problem, it would end up like a hybrid with that delayed car video you did with william osman and michael reeves
The latency was fine in the end ~200ms with the VR headset. Acceptable... but some teammates got nauseous for the whole day haha
@@maximedesimone6983 i guess VR nausea is still quite the problem huh
"william osman and michael reeves delayed car video"
Tom was there for that IIRC.
I would probably throw up after 100m tho xD
@@WanukeX I was about to say that. I also remember Tom being part of that project
I remember reading somewhere that the inspiration was from how seats were aligned on transport planes landing on aircraft carriers, when the arresting wire slowed the plane, you were pushed "back" into the seat cushions instead of needing something to stop whiplash. Captain Scarlet ftw!
Your military aircraft had cushions? Well laa-dee-daa!
Also studies for general aviation - as far as I know the reasons that seats are still forward is comfort and safety during takeoff and ascent, and admission of prior liability for people injured or killed during accidents who would have been saved by rear-facing seats.
@@MarkusNemesis haha I may have been incorrect about the cushions, I forgot that military budgets don't care about comfort
The C5 transport has backwards facing seats in the upper compartment.
@@CDArena nice
Huge props to Sparkmate. They seriously engineered the heck out of that thing, and they seem so passionate about it!
I can't help but wonder if the reason it was so difficult for you to focus, is if it was because you could still see the outside world in your peripheral vision, rather than being fully enclosed in the vehicle like in the TV show? Would have been easier if they had also built you in an enclosure so you couldn't see outside the vehicle?
I think it may help but unlike playing a game, your body would still feel the car turning opposite and the g forces applying contrary to the screen so it would still be difficult.
@@TheShinyShow As long as you're not prone to motion sickness that part is easily retrained by doing laps. Keeping your eyes and mind focused on the screen when there is so much more visual input telling you you're going backwards is a lot harder.
I was thinking about that too. However, sensing accelleration and motion alone will probably also throw you off. Still, I think you will get used to it similarly to the turning room/artificial gravity lab and the bike that turns into the wrong direction.
@@TheShinyShow That's actually exactly like driving in a racing sim with a VR headset. Every VR sim racer has experienced the dizziness from your eyes telling you that you're moving while your body is telling you that you're not, but that can easily be overcome by simply practicing so your brain gets used to it.
Also, it's a very small vehicle that really lets you "feel" the motion. I wonder if it would be easier in something massive where you don't feel it rock and move as much.
The Captain Scarlett transitions are just the cherry on top, great stuff.
Just needed more explosions
This reminds me a lot of the "reverse handlebar bike" which is rigged to steer the opposite direction from the turn. It's amazing how quickly a brain can adjust to "different" input-output modes with a little bit of practice. Like you, the biggest issue I have with driving games is the lack of peripheral vision.
Not sure about that one, translating turning the bars would be easy, but you actually mostly steer by leaning in to the corner.
The steering coming from the "front" wheels (in the direction of motion) has to be the most confusing. If the rear wheels steered it would be like backing up with a car's reverse camera, which is intuitive in a normal car.
I have driven a car rigged like that in an event site once, it required some getting used to but one colleague managed to take the lap in record time, like 1/3 the rest of us, taking the turns skidding and he said his secret was to always turning the wheels slightly back and forth because the feedback from that wheel motion kept the brain focused on the difference, the same time you start keeping the wheel still, once you start turning again in learnt behavior kicked in and you started to drive as if it was a normal car. But I guess that if you always drive such a car you will end up learning new reactions.
I also think that an enclosed drive space where you do not see the surroundings except through the screen would make it easier since you get no conflicting visual feedback.
Yes - or the classic 'upside down' glasses which show the world as our eyes really see it, only for the brain to reverse it so it feels 'normal'.
Gamers switch the up and down stick
I also had that same question watching the Captain Scarlet pilot in the 90s and it's good to finally have an answer. Thanks, Tom and Sparkmate!
The use of the transition was just such a nice touch too, I'm glad you did it!
When Tom actually tests this vehicle on the track, this strongly reminds me of the German TV-Show "Schlag den Raab", where in every episode the host an the candidate had to drive a race on a vessel they (most probably) have never used before. The backwards-car would have been the perfect vehicle for this event, and I am quite convinced Stefan Raab would have mastered it after a few minutes.
Yes!! Schlag den Raab is an amazing show, I really wish that format was succesful anywhere else but Germany.
@@MattTheSpratt Top Gear got close in some ways. It was more about cars in general, but every dang episode they found something weird or crazy to do with a vehicle they hadn't tested yet.
Isn't that the game show that had no fixed ending so it could finish at midnight or as late as 3am depending on how long people took to do tasks?
@@Gmackematix Yes, but that was part of the fun, at least for my friends and me :D
Tom's entire 15+ year career has led to this video.
The transition at 3:29 is genius. I'm actively resisting applauding in my office.
Do not underestimate Captain Scarlet. After Thunderbirds, it’s the most successful Gerry Anderson show. It also plays a vital part in British TV history.
I keep recalling "Supercar" where half of each episode was just starting the damn car.
Ohh, did he make thunderbirds too? I haven’t heard of the show in this video before but I did watch thunderbirds as a kid! I got to visit the set for the new thunderbirds tv show a couple years ago which was cool.
@@rachelcookie321 Thunderbirds, Stingray, Joe 90, UFO, Space: 1999, Terrahawks… Gerry made many sci-fi shows. And thanks to his son Jamie, the legacy keeps going.
@@rachelcookie321 Never knew that as well ;) I think Captain Scarlet never made it to Dutch television, as I only recall the Thunderbirds, which was just way cool as well. Maybe it has been broadcast here, but I just don't know. The 'illegal' REM-island TV broadcasts could probably have shown them, but really, not sure.
We had Thunderbirds in Australia, but we never had Captain Scarlet - I had no idea that show existed
Wow! You've answered the question I've had since I watched Captain Scarlet as a kid in the 70s. Me and my brother tried to do the same with a pedal car when we were young and kept crashing!!
I love that, while they’re introducing the kart to Tom, there’s just casually a guy on crutches in the background, and it’s not clear whether it’s related or not 😂
Crutch guy 03:28
4:56 "sometimes things can happen"
*Nervous laugh*
guy in the background in crutches: "just smile and nod, smile and nod"
When it comes to geeky experiments - just because you can ...... definitely means you should. This brought me so much joy!
I think this is the only Tom Scott video where I've actually been worried for him. Even the tightroping, cave climbing, and other adventures didn't scare me as much as this one did!
Reminds me of Destin from Smarter Everyday's reverse bicycle. Seems to me that if you learned to drive like this you could get really competent, but then have a hard time re-learning to drive normally.
Unless you get motion sickness.
I don't think that's something you can get rid of by training, is it?
The same notion occurred to me. It's impractical, but it would be cool to see people who get very good at driving this or riding that bike and do like racing and tricks. It would suck though if you were driving normally and your brain flipped and you had an accident because you lefted when you should have righted.
Sort of. I think the backwards brain bike is harder
For this in order to turn left, you turn left.
In the backwards bike, to turn left you turn right (and have to lean left)
That was my thought as well. Could be very dangerous if it ends the same way where you forget how to drive an normal vehicle.
For anyone interested in new episodes of Captain Scarlet: the company Big Finish have made a couple of full cast Audio Dramas based on the original series. There are even 2 free episodes to check it out!
Big Finish is excellent in their work, from Doctor Who to Anderson Entertainment, and many more shows in between.
S.I.G Daniel!
The most dangerous moment was not when you were on the track, it was when you got off it and into your own car and started driving, as you had practically unlearned how to drive. :D
When I watched the show on the B&W TV, I could make out the strings.
I also remember the die cast model I had, with it's 9 axles : 5 outer wheels and 4 inner wheels plus the tracks on the back. It was, by far, the heaviest, and biggest, die cast model that I ever had.
I imagine the most confusing thing is that intuitively this feels like looking into your rearview mirror, and when going in reverse you right is left and left is right.
would have liked to see someone who has never driven try to drive this with the controller.
I think they reversed the steering aswell
Oh, an interesting theory! I wonder if mirroring the viewscreen would help or make things worse.
I'm so glad kids these days are growing up with TV shows that have cool action scenes, explosions, _and_ coherent plots. (Not all of them, of course, but it's nice that there are some that get all three.)
Tbf, there is a massive back catalog by now. I can offer my future children dozens of shows to fall in love with.
Just in time for cable to become irrelevant and most kids to spend the majority of their time watching youtube and social media creators with none of the above (e.g. Ryan's Toy Review).
A newsletter "pre-release", nice!
"Tom, you're kinda headed toward the only other car in the lot. You have plenty of time to turn, Tom, so go ahead. Just pick a direction and turn."
I recognized the thrustmaster in the thumbnail and thought it would be a game. Made the full blown vehicle more surprising!
Hello fellow tmx users
it's the only Xbox supported thrustmaster wheel IIRC
yup - even if all they did was a full motion driving sim, it would have been a good show case of who they are and what they do.
But they build a whole vehicle - so going for the easiest solution is not their thing.
@@TheSkcube I think there’s also the TX
Great idea. Might have been easier with the sides filled in. Would have been spectacular if filmed at Slough Trading Estate where Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and Stingray were filmed! 😊
would have had to go to Slough though
I'm sorry Mom and Dad.. I went to Slough.
@@Haru-fq4ze
Again.
@@frankharr9466 Going to Slough twice would have a devastating toll on a person.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721
Especially twice.
I wanted something like this when I was younger. Was not influenced by any show or anything, just sat in the bus backwards once and thought "why is this not the standard everywhere?". Because in a crash, there is no way you would fly out the window, and instead of 2 belts catching your whole weight, it would instead be distributed across the whole seat.
That's another explanation of why safety theater in airplanes is really just that: theater.
If they really cared about safety, they'd fly you in windowless planes facing backwards. (Just like the military does. Because their passengers don't have a right to complain, and they have a higher than average chance to get involved in dangerous situations.)
So as for the bonus question: What if you were to invert the right/left control inputs, would that mean the learning curve is gone, or would your physical/feeling-based feedback still confuse you?
It does seem to be that the steering follows the screen.
I think the most intuitive control would be mirrored, like driving in reverse with a rear view mirror.
@@danb4275 I think driving with any sort of mirrored or rotated view could be catastrophic when looking forward. The only reason it's acceptable when looking backwards is because you (usually) aren't moving in that direction and therefore have a much lower risk of hitting anything based on an incorrect response to what you're seeing.
I was a huge Captain Scarlet fan, and loved the models. I didn’t remember that feature of driving, but I’d imagine it would become second nature quickly.
I'm pleasantly surprised that I'm still somehow learning about new Thunderbirds-esque shows! Didn't realize it was such a fleshed-out genre!
I watched as a child and I remember the driving backwards clearly. I also remember a kid turning in an essay verbatim of the show and getting a prize; that still irks me to this day... it's been 42 years!
I watched all of Gerry Anderson's supermarionation series and Captain Scarlet was definitely a favourite. Can't remember any of the plots like in Thunderbirds by the models were amazing. Also very progressive for the time with multiracial female fighter pilots.
Always appreciate Tom's transparency and honesty. He could have cut out jumping the curb to save some face, but he left it in to tell the whole story!
I feel like most UA-camrs would of left it in though. Not for honesty, but because it’s a bit of intensity.
I think it's more in there for spice and reinforces how trippy it is to drive.
As a child of the 70’s living in England and watching all the Anderson supermarionation shows, this was brilliant! You have to keep the seven boom jump cut! 🇬🇧👍🏻😁
I am really curious about something: Did you try inverting the screen, right to Left? And did you try inverting the control, right to left?
I want to see this attempted now.
@@nymalous3428 Right?! If they didn't try those permutations, the experiment is incomplete.
It's like when you're trying to remember a song, and you can't remember one little piece of it.
It's hard to let go. It's an incomplete gestalt.
I mean, maybe they did, and he just didn't address it, but I'd like to know.
I was thinking the same. I can reverse quite well in a car, whether I am using the mirrors or looking over my shoulder. I never mistake left or right, because the top of the steering wheel will still move in the direction I am turning. But in his setup it is way more difficult. He isn't mistaking going forward or going backwards, but mixes up left and right because it is the other way around.
I don't wanna be that guy, but the controls are the correct way, he turns left, and the buggy turns left.
Mirroring the screen would be unusable for one very, very obvious reason: Signs. Any writing would be essentially illegible.
1:53 absolutely possible, the Soviets built many light tanks that could float! They're very cool :D
I think another factor to this thing being hard to drive is the fact that it has wind inside, and you also have great sight. The vehicle this is based on barely has windows and the driver is truly enclosed, very different!
If your SPV weighs 8 ton, and your SPV does not displace 8 ton of water, you will not float I'm afraid.
@@john_michael_white I mean depending on how far you're willing to stretch the definition of float you could totally float it on rocks.
@@john_michael_white It would actually only have to displace 8 cubic meters of water to do that actually. I imagine as long as it is airtight even the design from the show ought to be just fine to float.
@@SILVERF0X13 That's just stating what I said a different way, and It's ton, not tonne, so would be about 8.15 cubic metres.
@@john_michael_white Even using modest calculations, it should easily float. The total estimated volume is from 900 to 1600 cu ft. There should be no problem. Tanks float all the time and are much heavier.
here whilst it's unlisted, I feel naughty.
Agreed, would be fun to do every week. The newsletter-crew get to see the vid slightly earlier...
Why
@@JimmyJames10-k7v Why not?
Once we're all in cars that are operated by algorithms, backwards-mounted seats could easily become the standard for this very reason.
So why isn't standard in buses, where every passenger is facing backwards while the driver is facing forward, the only time you see backwards seats in a bus is for space optimization and only in few seats.
@@Larroseba many ppl hate backwards-facing seats with a vengeance. Some suffer from motion sickness due to the mismatched directional hints; others just aren't used to them
What @@blahza12345 said, plus a crash from behind can be surprisingly serious too.
@@blahza12345 Mhm i personally avoid rear facing seats for only one reason: i can't see my stop coming up unless i know the route perfectly and end up missing it. So maybe you can count that among the reasons rear facing seats on a bus aren't preferred.
Besides, crash safety is just not a concern with a bus, because they are lightweight flimsy structures sitting atop a lot of frame mass, you aren't getting out of a serious enough crash alive no matter which way you're around. In fact it's difficult to even imagine a circumstance under which rear facing seat is safer in these.
Captain Scarlet is a treasure, the music and the screen transitions are the best thing!
What a brilliant idea! I’m old enough to have watched the original run of Captain Scarlet. As a child I never registered that it was remotely odd to drive facing backward, I couldn’t drive, back then.
Didn't Thunderbirds also have that pink limo with four front wheels? I think Gerry Anderson was a bit of a herbalist back in the day, smoking the electric lettuce.
@@krashd Tyrrell actually tried a six-wheel (four front) F1 car in the late seventies.
listening to Tom read off the fictional specifications, it strikes me that the fictional vehicle was somewhat lighter than I expected, considering that it fills a role some where between an armoured car and a tank
Fancy Spectrum engineering.
@@56bturn Late 2060's material sciences! Probably got some seriously advanced composite materials in there.
Check out the video named something like Century 21 Tech Talk - SPV if you’d care to know more. It’s part of a series discussing the traits of many of the vehicles from Gerry Anderson’s series over the years.
Of course, it has to be light, so it floats.
0:57 "It's now in HD, so you can see the puppet strings."
Me: *_squinting_* "Ah yes, _very_ visible, I can _totally_ see them."
Probably a little easier to see if the file's on your computer or something than if it went through UA-cam streaming compression and then probably came out at a lower resolution than the file on Tom's computer.
you can see them clearly at 2:25
I haven’t watched the HD scans of Scarlet, but I have watched the Thunderbirds ones, and the visibility of the strings depends highly on lighting and background colour. But there are times when they’re glaringly obvious. (Though much more obvious to me, which I found surprising, was how the scale of the props is more self evident - eg a 3" dictation tape recorder masquerading as a large computer tape drive, or “grain of wheat” lightbulbs acting as large warning lights on the wall.)
Thank you because I had forgotten that as a child I fantasized about this idea thinking it would eventually replace seat belts, and I didn't know I had had this itch for over 30 years
As someone else who watched Gerry Anderson shows as a kid, I can confirm that this is sick and those transitions gave me some serious nostalgia. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to have to binge Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and Stingray...
Filmed in Technicolour!
As someone married to a CPST (Child Passenger Safety Technician, aka child carseat tech), I can vouch for just how much driving facing backwards is safer. Learning to drive on a monitor, even with the opposite g forces, would be simple, just take time. We got used to driving forward after all. Closing in the cabin so that you can't see the outside world except for the screens would help with acclimating to it.
The major problem would be making sure the vehicle is safe when it's not operating at 100%. If the screens glitch and such. I wonder if you could achieve something similar with mirrors, which would solve this issue as well as the latency one.
Sorry, I must have been asleep when our school taught what all the acronyms mean. 😗
@@krashd one quick Google search led me to Child Passenger Safety Technician. It’s truly wild how much information is right at your fingertips
@@krashd This internet thing you may have heard of told me it meant 'Child Protective Seat Technician'. 😁
@@Zizwizwee My lesson for today: refresh a tab that's been sitting a while before commenting. I'd say 'great minds' but I don't think I can make that claim right now...
@@krashd also when they taught you to think for yourself apparently
This whole time I was thinking “I bet that handwavey “eh, you get used to it” line has more truth behind it than Tom expected”.
With Tom’s increased proficiency on the track after an afternoon of practice, I fully believe a few months’ intensive training would be more than enough to pull-off the driving they do in the show.
After all, they have to be specially rated, a regular driving license doesn’t cover an SPV! It’s going to be more involved training than that required to drive a large lorry or bus, but it seems eminently doable by a committed military with secret vehicle caches!
In the , uh, "source material", they are completely enclosed with the only visual signals being from the monitor. Do you think that would have improved your skill or the time to learn? Also, did you have to re-adjust getting back into the car later??
Captain Blue says in the show that he *only* drives the SPV. I assume that's because the writers realised his brain would have to be rewired a certain amount and it would make normal driving difficult.
I would have loved to see Tom's perspective while driving, just to get an idea of what it feels like to sit in this car. With the screen in the middle, while the landscape passes you in the wrong direction... Still a very cool idea and a great watch!
I imagine it would be no different from what you'd expect. Doesn't need a pov shot because it wouldn't do justice to the experience without peripheral vision and the actual process of driving the kart.
Aside from the screen and controls, it would be like riding in the "way back" seat of a station wagon.
I'm more of a Thunderbirds/Stingray fan, but this is cool too. Always nice to see Supermarionation being brought up. Good stuff!
stingrayyyyyyy, stingray.
bada dada, dada.
Marina, aquamarina!
The situational awareness is horrid!
You CAN'T look at your surroundings!
But as always, a fun video, good work Tom!
that could probably be fixed with more screens that let you look around as if you were facing forwards
though it doesnt fix the accelleration feeling off...but is suspect thats something you could get used to
you could just add more cameras and screens :)
One year later, Oceangate would take the idea of using an game controller to control a actual vehicle and put it to good use.
I think that maybe mirroring the video feed or reversing the direction of the controller/wheel would have made driving backwards easier. That way your brain is doing things the way you see it, but the result is appropriate for reality.
Thank you, had the same idea with mirroring the video.
That would have been a really interesting thing to try. I could see it working, or messing you up further and I don't know which feels more likely.
Also if you mirror the feed, mechanical steering becomes way easier. All you need to do is figure out how to get the steering column behind the seat then put the wheel on the opposite side.
You wouldn't be able to read road signs so if this was supposed to be road applicable, then you'd need to get used to reading mirrored text
It’s definitely easier with a mirrored screen so it still feels like you’re driving normally. I haven’t tried it in real life, in games it can work. It would still feel weird, like sitting backwards on a train, but it would be easier.
I loved the part where you nearly died, because you tried racing on the road surrounded by steel poles!
You should try getting a reversing camera Tom. I got one the other week and I haven't looked back since.
Oh lord
this was good.
😂
lmao
get out...
“Filmed on closed, private roads with safety precautions. Do not attempt.”
I too, have a backwards facing car
Tom is a Captain Scarlet fan, mega based. After years of Gerry Anderson himself slating this off as impossible, Tom Scott is here to save the day.
S.I.G
@@GerryAndersonTV Indeed. Spectrum Is Green.
5:56
Cameraman passed the vibe check💀
Even flooooow
To be clear, the "safer" part isn't the question that was answered. I will say that driving in the dark and without passengers takes away 2 very large variables. Well done!
For the camera, you could use an FPV camera system like those used in FPV racing drones. Very low latency and high picture quality if using one of the digital variants (like DJI or newly announced Walksnail/Fatshark components). Simple to set up and implement, and can utilize the "VR" style goggles or a screen. Cheers!
Agree. They made this 10 times harder than they needed to. Some really bad ideas went into building this vehicle, not the least of which was a hand brake from the ceiling.
I'm impressed they managed to have such a good latency with WebRTC, and it has to be good given that Tom didn't mention it at all, so I'm impressed.
I don't understand why they can't just connect the camera to monitor, pure video signal, surely that's near 0 latency
@@jaydogg9933 I assume that if you were to do that, then you'd be fighting the latency of your input being slower than whats on screen. I'd think that there has to be some validation of latency from both sides to make sure everything goes well
@@max213421 wrong, if you think about it - input and display latencies add, not cancel out.
@@jaydogg9933 HDMI isn't a pure video signal, and neither is DisplayPort. I don't think anything is, these days. If I was building this, I'd be looking into the technology of the display panel itself and seeing if I could get data from the camera's CCD rather than trying to use a whole, unhacked monitor. It would not be trivial though; the data rate of modern hardware is immense. It might simply be impossible to send data through a cable that fast. As for sending it in analog form, I've had trouble getting a clean display in 1920x1080 over VGA. "4k" is 4 times that many pixels. ... And now I'm laughing because I've remembered cables themselves have a delay line effect. Inductance along the length of the cable (as weak as it is) combines with capacitance between signal and ground (or signal and inverted signal) to delay the signal. There's also a risk of smearing the signal if you don't match impedances correctly.
The resolution could be lowered, but then the question becomes, "Can you drive backward _with a lower-quality display?"_ :)
@@jaydogg9933 Probably because they wanted to be able to monitor it separately than just the monitor in front of the driver.
I can’t even imagine the waiver Tom had to sign to be allowed behind the wheel of this thing, this is amazing
*Behind the controller
nah its paris, they're used to drive their cars like go karts, they probably thought it was fine lmao
Not the US. No problem
Feels illegal watching this as an unlisted. I guess the newsletter link isn’t public yet
Very illegal, I'm checking over my shoulder for the Tom Scott police.
It is now..
oi m8, got a loicense for that link?
This was my favourite Tv programme as a kid. There was a Christmas annual that had full schematics for all the vehicles and I would spend hours looking at them.
I can't tell you how happy I was that you kept doing the Captain Scarlet transitions throughout the video.
I'd be curious to see how much your driving improves if you had blinders covering your peripheral vision. Then you'd only have the conflict between what you see and the acceleration your body is experiencing
CAPTAIN SCARLET! I rewatched the whole thing a few years back when I was off work sick and I still love it, plot holes be damned. This is so much fun 😂
I can't even play the original Wip3'out without switching to third-person at the start of every race. This is nuts!
Well done, Tom!
This is really weird! It's easy to say 'just look at the screen' but in reality, especially for those who are used to driving, because you're moving backwards and you KNOW you are, to go around a right turn you would normally need to turn the wheel to the left (when reversing), but you actually need to turn to the right because the car isn't ACTUALLY going backwards!
I wonder what it'd be like if there we visual blocker on each side of the vehicle so that you don't need you go backwards
An easy way to reduce the confusion would simply be to reverse the controls/camera so it aligns with your perception
8:00 I think part of the navigation is not done by sight, but by sense of motion/balance. Once you get up to speed, that switch happens. Or the motion sense becomes dominant. Hence that time you turned the wrong way.
But one bigger issue was that you saw too much of the world and the screen was wrongly centered. The original had:
1. A screen directly in front of the seat, not a shared one for both seats
2. A small window a 90° turn away from the screen, so peripheral vision could not get in the way
3. Of course they also had training to re-allign the sense of motion navigation
The correct way to do this is to mirror the screen and have the steering work in the same direction that you turn, not reverse.
I was looking for this. I was thinking the same thing
Got to like how Tom Scott riffed on the Captain Scarlet scene transition, then used the same scene transition technique twice in this video himself.
I have this weird feeling that is entirely intentional. ;)
I think, just maybe, that may be the joke. Idk tho
🤦🏻♂️
I loved the scene transition. He got the right drum music too!
What an awesome make-it-real project! I wonder if thinking about what the controls differently would help. As in, turning the wheel points the back of the vehicle in the same direction. Or, point the wheel away from the corner. Conceiving of the controls in a way other than "It's the same but I'm backwards" may help gain an intuitive use of them more quickly.
Thanks for sharing, keep up the great work!
I'm wondering whether it would be easier if the monitor view were mirrored. Then the lateral forces you felt when turning would be as expected.
I was hoping they would have tried that.
Also the steering would be to the correct side.
I was going to say that. You could even mirror the screen, controls, or both and see which combination is easier for your brain to adapt to
@@AngelWedge agreed that would be awesome
I was thinking the same thing (:
love the camera guy following around on a skateboard
Is it just me or is that scene transition the coolest thing ever. I’d love to see that used in modern films