Would you allow people to fly your plane remotely via a web service for a fee?

You mean sort of like an RC flight simulator, except that when they're going to crash I either have to take over the controls or I have to watch a whole bunch of work hit the ground hard?

Oooh oooh. I'll sign up. Right after I find a doctor to spend eight hours amputating my feet, toe by toe and without anesthesia.

It's a way for people to make money from their hobby.

To make it safer, you might take over the controls whenever the airplane descends below some altitude, whether or not it seems to be under control.

Amir

Ideally, there would be many providers. So a user would just visit the site and see which planes are flying or about to fly soon.

What if there

You can have users pay more if they want to wait less.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, you could have a collaborative system where a large number of people could control the plane all at once. Depending on skill level, your inputs might have more influence than those from others. You could even turn it into some sort of game so that you are rewarded more for inputs that the online audience likes.

I don't think that most customers would

It's more accurate than a flight simulator and there's a novelty factor to it.

Amir

Reminds me of the Video Phone, an idea characterized by Invention And Technology Magazine as "a solution to a problem that didn't exist".

More specifically, to answer your questions, I don't think I would be interested in such a service, either as a user or a provider. It's hard enough for two guys to agree to meet at the flying field at the same time. How would you get synchronized with your customers? What if you wanted to do it Tuesday afternoon but it was too windy? What if there were too many people on your channel? Would a person who is too lazy or cheap to get their own airplane hang in there long enough to wait for the channel to be available? I don't think that most customers would have the patience to get involved. Anybody with sufficient patience would probably get their own airplanes. I also don't see how a customer would find a real airplane in which they have no investment to be any more entertaining than a high quality simulator of the type currently available.

As a provider I don't think that I would be interested because you probably wouldn't be able to charge enough to make it worthwhile.

No, I don't fly RC, but I've played with X-Plane, which is pretty realistic from what I understand.

To make this idea work, I would need to find some way to get a large number of users involved with a single flight in one way or another. Some could contribute to flying the plane while others might just watch for example.

Yes, the details to make this work would require lots of thought and experimentation.

I wanted to see whether there is interest in this idea before spending a lot of time working out the details.

Amir

You'll be hard pressed to squeeze a dollar out of somebody for this idea. Having users "pay more to wait less" just sounds ridiculous to me.

You don't fly RC, do you? What you're talking about sounds like one of those stupid Nintendo games where you push buttons to make a surfer or skateboarder do stunts, which are all preprogrammed. Flying a real airplane is nothing like that. If you have ten people flying it, the decision has to be made which person is actually flying it. In reality, only one person can fly the airplane until it's passed to the next person. If one guy tells the plane to turn left, another guy tells it to turn right, and the other 8 people do nothing (which is a command to hold the current heading) the plane can't obey everybody.

I'm not the kind of person who likes to say that things are impossible, but I don't see how you would write a program to determine a pilot's skill and reward him with more control input based on audience appreciation. The whole thing sounds ridiculous. You're a programmer, right? In the world of computers you can do whatever you want to with programming. But when you're working with a real airplane, that changes everything. You suddenly have to consider real factors. How do you define pilot skill? And if the skillful pilot's controls take precedence, how do the competitors get a chance to demonstrate their skill?

A remote VR flying experience with a buddy-box backup for safety......hmmmmmm. Very innovative idea, Amir. I'd love to give it a try. Looking forward to seeing your fee schedule.

Abel

If you are serious about this idea your first step should be to get a plane and learn to fly it. It would be hard to understand what you're dealing with if you don't know how to fly. Even if it doesn't work out, flying RC planes is fun.

You can neither be a programer or a model airplane enthusiast. Step 1: Learn to fly a plane, see what reaction time you need to be able to fly it.

Step 2: Ask an experienced programmer if it is possible to even make a program that will support that kind of reaction time. It is not possible.

Also: If people can't get out of the door to fly a plane, then they sure are NOT MA enthusiasts. How many flying fields have electricity installed? How many of them have Internet connection?

Nice thought, and its good that you asked, but there are better ways of making money :)

Stefan Pettersen

"Amir Michail" skrev i melding news: snipped-for-privacy@h2g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

Right there you'll have at the very least a whole bunch of problems:

1. You need relatively high resolution to be able to recognize the plane and/or ground markers. High resolution means high bandwidth requirements AND quite a bit of delay encoding the video. I'd reckon you'll lose about half a sec right there.
2. Transmitting live high-res video reliably and without frame loss from a plane is not quite as easy as it sounds.
3. Forget "from the ground". You'd need someone to track the plane, or build an automatic tracking system. If you've ever flown on a sim, you'll know that ground cam helps zilch, since the window is too narrow to give any sense of where exactly the plane is in relation to the ground.

Uhm. Oke, aside from the video encoding delay, the transmission delay (from the flying field somehow to the server and then to the customer) and then the decoding delay... now you add even more lag by sending the control input back to the site. Do you even realize HOW much lag that is?

Sorry. You need to start over. VOTING??? Add even more delay? Sheesh.

Hell no. My planes aren't THAT fast, and even they are across a football field in maybe 4-5 seconds. I'd definitely not trust them to a "pilot" whose skill is at best doubtful, who has to fly with, oh, at least one second delay between visual and control input... wait, that's not hell no... that's a HELL NO! :)

There's a rather easy way to test most of that scenario: Take two computers. Put VLC (VideoLAN Client, free) on both machines. Take any video you have, and on one machine let VLC play it AND encode it for transmission. Now set up the other computer to receive the video. Set the monitors side by side and see what the delay is. Add maybe 1/5th of a second buffering (and that's very conservative) for some simulated internet delay and control feedback. See? Now, to get another important factor into the equation make sure you transmit the video (and optionally sound) in an encoded signal no more than maybe 300kb/sec ... notice the loss of detail? Even slow turns will be a blocky blur. Or, alternatively, look at the various in-flight videos on YouTube to see the crappy video. How you expect people to fly remotely that way is beyond me.

Anyway. nice try. Maybe if you find a plane that flies at a snails pace, takes eons for turns/climbs/dives, has a built-in safety to prevent oversteering in any direction and probably just puts your customers to sleep... yeh, then it might work.

Jen

If you already use X-Plane, try this: Use a camera to capture the screen in realtime, use VLC to send it over a network, write a trivial piece of software to transmit keyboard/joystick control back to the computer running X-Plane, and try to fly. Since its for testing only, you don't need a fancy-shmancy setup. And using X-Plane you won't be losing money on crashing RC planes.

Jen

They don't have to be MA enthusiasts to want fly a model plane from their home in a risk-free and relatively cheap way. This would be for the "casual gamers" of model planes.

See the technology used in justin.tv:

I don't know what sort of lag this has. But even if there is a noticeable delay, in a few years the situation will likely improve considerably.

Amir

meldingnews: snipped-for-privacy@h2g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

You argue that bandwidth and time lag would likely be problems. Maybe so with today's technology, but the situation is likely to be different in a few years.

As for voting introducing lag, well that would depend on how the voting mechanism is implemented: you could count votes as soon as they are cast.

BTW, some work done on interactive audience participation:

Amir

I think it's a very creative and interesting idea, despite the possibly insurmountable problems as outlined by others.

I don't think anybody mentioned that an audio feed would be necessary, especially in the case of glow or gas models. Preferably stereo, and of the highest possible quality. Dave

I've always been amazed at people who ask your opinion and then argue with it.

You're talking to a bunch of model airplane people because you wanted to know what we think. Now you know.

Seems like this idea would be better implemented on a R/C tank battle set-up. Anyway, I'm off to the field for some real flying...

David

Hope you have good insurance in case some person is hurt or you cause property damage. If you are an AMA member I doubt that their insurance would cover it. You are only allowed one demo flight using a buddy box. Otherwise the person must be enrolled in a training program with ground school. Read the safety rules. If you aren't an AMA member, shame on you! ;=}

Amir, you are SO obsessed with this idea that it's a bit weird.

Please forget it... lol

Or make it happen and make us all look bad. I dare you :)

Stefan Pettersen P.S. I can just picture 10 people sitting at their computer around the world paying a fee to look at a small dot in the sky and voting as to wether it should go right or left next. That would truly be people with some kind of disorder.. (remember that after a left turn, you better go left again to bring the plane back :D )

"Amir Michail" skrev i meld> > Stefan Pettersen already po> > > A video camera would transmit live video from the plane and/or the > > > ground.

Rather unlikely. If you've ever followed the development of the Internet in general and video/transmission technology in particular, you'd know that there are certain factors pretty much putting the nail in the coffin of anything close to real time video transmission.

If you're really interested in the technical issues, feel free to go to any university library and look up the various dissertations targeting this specific issue. The various h.nnn codecs were mainly developed to combat such issues, but even they simply cannot overcome a rather fundamental principle of computing: To process ANY data takes time. To COMPRESS data takes even more time. You've got two conflicting goals:

1. Transmitting high-resolution, high-quality video suitable for providing a sense of airplane orientation and movement
2. Provide this service to a wide audience, which means limited bandwidth for transmission.

The two goals are mutually contradicting each other. You're right, bandwidth will improve over time, making it easier to deal with that issue. However, with current technology and CPU power I don't see this happening soon enough to validate your business idea.

The next problem you're facing is much more difficult to overcome: Latency. Basically, the best latency you could hope for would be a wire directly from your service to your customer, without switching equipment in-between. Now, most people erroneously seem to believe electronic signals (on regular wire, not talking optical at the moment) travel with the speed of light. That is, unfortunately for you, not even close. Thus there is ALWAYS transmission lag depending on the distance of the remote operator. On top of that you don't have a direct wire, there is switching equipment in-between. While modern switching equipment is rather efficient, it still introduces processing delays.

Do yourself a favor: Use traceroute and check the latency between you and a host on the other side of the planet. I'll bet you'll not get much better RTT than maybe 150ms. You think that's not much? Think again. There's plenty of ways for you to try out the effects of lag. I've given you a few possibilities in my last mail. There's plenty more ways to test this yourself. On top of that keep in mind that even just half a second is A LOT of time when talking about RC aircraft.

Correct, you can minimize the impact. Since processing is involved it'll still be introducing ever so slightly more lag.

I'm aware of such systems. They're not new and have been around at least since the early 1980's. You're missing the point though: All these projects have comparatively low latency because there is only comparatively(!) little processing involved. If you happen to have access to any such systems, try adding 250ms (that's only 1/4th of a second, a rather optimistic value) lag to the action and see what happens.

However, it's your money going down the drain. Go ahead and see if you can pull this off. It's certainly doable with a lot of development and all kinds of safeties built-in, but definitely not nearly as easy as you seem to believe it is. My suggestion would be to try this with a lot slower vehicles first (boats on a pond maybe) and then move up to, say, cars on a racetrack, and only if that works well(!) then try it with airplanes.

Jen