Put the left trigger to the plastic casing: driving cars with game controllers?

September 10, 2007 4:09 PM

Aside from the problem of retraining people to use the new system, and the problems inherent in any drive-by-wire system, is there anything stopping us from using Playstation and Xbox controllers to drive cars?

I mean normal cars, in real life, as a substitute for the traditional steering wheel/gearshift/pedals combo. Sure, it may not be terribly practical (though we have raised a whole generation of future drivers on the likes of Gran Turismo and Forza), but I'm wondering if there are good technical or cultural reasons preventing people from wiring a controller into their car and having at it.

If this is too Chatfilter-y, I apologize in advance.

posted by chrominance to travel & transportation (18 comments total)

technically, i would think that steering wheels and pedals offer much more precision (as well as leeway for mistakes) than a joystick or a button.
posted by gnutron at 4:20 PM on September 10, 2007

Good cultural reason: People know the standard interface. Every year there's a dozen-odd newspaper stories about (usually elderly) people hitting the accelerator when they mean to brake and injuring or killing bystanders; consider what would happen when everyone had a new interface.

(Plus, the steering wheel + pedals thing lets you free up at least one hand to control the rest of the car: lights, heat, window, mirror, phone, coffee, newspaper...)

Good technical reason: Feedback back through the steering wheel is critical. It's not just a one-way control; the way the wheels interact with the road turn the steering wheel, too, and that provides important driver feedback. I mean, even on the Playstation people who are really into driving buy wheel controllers with feedback!

Other good technical reason: Regardless of their "analogness", the buttons on a Playstation controller do not have the range of inputs that the full travel of an accelerator or brake pedal have.
posted by mendel at 4:21 PM on September 10, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

You mean replacing a steering wheel with a D-Pad? Real-world driving requires much finer level of control than simply pressing a left button to go left. Think about all the little things you have to adjust for when driving in real life: potholes, turns that aren't 90*, wheel mis-alignment. Your fingers and senses would go numb trying to correct for a 1* camber all day with a tiny D-Pad.
posted by junesix at 4:23 PM on September 10, 2007

There is one thing, yes; inertia.

Video game controllers work for driving in video games because you don't physically move when your online avatar moves; hence, you can get away with large movements of the avatar from small movements of your controller -- and equally subtle corrections when you overshoot.

Try the same thing for driving in real life and the small movement of your thumb that induces a large movement in the car you're in also causes you to move -- and the amount of movement that occurs, while small compared to the amount of movement a steering wheel requires to incude movement in a car, is huge compared to that needed for a video game controller.

So you turn the car a little, and your body shifting introduces some unwanted movement, and you try to correct, and the correction causes your body to shift again, and so more unwanted movement -- and god forbid you overreact to something and turn the car unexpectedly so much that the tensing of your muscles prevents any kind of recovery.

Same applies to using triggers for gas and brake, and of course buttons are just right out. In essence, the steering wheel, gas and brake act as a damper to filter out unwanted movements.

This is not only done with the scale of the movements required, but the direction, and what part of you is moving. If you clench a steering wheel in anger, no harm done; if you bang on the steering wheel, no harm done. Emotional movements of our hands and arms tend to be forward and back, but movements required to guide the car are side to side. And thankfully we generally don't respond to emotion with our legs and feet, except perhaps to stiffen -- and if our foot is on the brake, stiffening just means more braking force, which in a fearsome situation isn't a bad thing.

Oh, and if I sneezed while driving, I'd certainly want a big steering wheel to damped that movement, versus a thumbstick sending me off the road.
posted by davejay at 4:23 PM on September 10, 2007

Reliability and liability, particularly where steering is concerned, are chief concerns for manufacturers. Fly by wire aircraft control systems, which are doubly, triply, and in some cases, quadruply redundant, have still failed in flight (a number of early F-16 fighter crashes were attributed to simple failures of wiring insulation). And aircraft get much higher inspection and maintenance levels, than the average family car.

So, the potential for catastrophic liability is one main issue. Mechanical steering linkages have long been engineered to fail slowly and generally very predictably, and it is quite possible in almost all crash situations to examine the wreckage and easily and accurately determine the wear state of the mechanical steering gear, to determine if it had been properly maintained.
posted by paulsc at 4:27 PM on September 10, 2007

A few years ago, Mercedes did a prototype called the F 200 that had a joystick interface instead of a steering wheel and pedals. I could be driven from either the left or right seat.

Imagine what would happen in such a car if the driver suddenly made a single jerky movement. Any interface where tiny movements by the controller translate to huge movements by the vehicle is not a safe one.
posted by The World Famous at 4:28 PM on September 10, 2007

In product design, there's Hick's Law, which states:

The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases.

The time for a person to make simple decisions about adjustments on a device increases with the number of controls. For example, if a child runs out in front of your car a steering wheel offers only two decisions - swerve right or swerve left - increasing your chances of avoiding an accident. A joystick or game controller offers too many options for the average driver to make split second decisions.
posted by quadog at 4:31 PM on September 10, 2007

I can't imagine driving with a game controller for exactly the reasons mentioned above. No feedback and too-tiny of movements to do diligence for 1500kg of steel. I don't buy the Hick's Law arguments, as you'd just remove any buttons that you didn't use. Or hook them up to your cruise control or something.

However, I can totally imagine driving a car with a purpose-designed throttle and joystick. The throttle would have to return to neutral on release, though. The throttle on my Subaru Impreza is fly-by-wire already; it's a little weird, but nothing a little experience design and some logarithmic springs couldn't fix. The standard, manual stick-shift transmission would have to be dropped in favor of automatic transmissions on most vehicles and DSG in performance and industrial models. I'd put the up/down shifters on the t-bar of the throttle.

Keep in mind that it is absolutely not okay to use an axis of the joystick for throttle. This results in steering instability while trying to regulate the throttle during a turn. In a DSG in manual mode, you'd have to rock the joystick all over the place in order to shift... your drag-track starts would be abysmal.

You would need to constrain the joystick's movement to the X-Y plane (assuming Y is up toward the sky in your universe, and that X is the line of the horizon), at least mostly. A little play seems advisable, but not so much that you could expend movement in the wrong direction. I would want those constraints to feel solid and robust.

Driving requires feedback from the steering device. It needs to jerk a little bit when you hit a bump, and jam against the curb. On a steering wheel, this happens automatically, as the wheels are linked to the steering wheel directly and so force the steering wheel to move with them. (This used to be far more noticeable, before power steering.)

I'm a software engineer, not an automotive one, so I'm not sure what sort of feedback you would want for steering. I suppose that simple wheel position and hydraulic pressure might do it. But, I'm not sure.

So, doable, yes... but not on a SixAxis.
posted by Netzapper at 5:08 PM on September 10, 2007

Is there even any way to go less than full speed in driving videogames anyway? I always had a hard time driving at a constant speed in, say, GTA, because the gas is just assigned to one button and if you want to drive at some constant speed less than full speed you would have to continually tap it slightly.
posted by pravit at 5:10 PM on September 10, 2007

There's the reliability issue. Even if your power steering completely fails, your steering wheel is still physically connected to the steering mechanism and so you can turn the car. Likewise with the brakes -- you can still stop the car even if the power brake booster fails (and if the engine stops producing vacuum, you have a small reserve of vacuum to operate it.) In both cases power brakes and power steering are just there to assist you, but there is still a direct connection. So there are very good safety reasons why the current situation is the way it is: it fails safe.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:47 PM on September 10, 2007

About reliability: that's sort of what I meant by "problems inherent in a drive-by-wire system." Presumably the same caveats apply to any car using traditional controls connected to a drive-by-wire system (as apparently the Prius is). I don't know how the redundancy systems on a Prius work, though, so perhaps they would require the use of a wheel/pedal setup.

I still think it'd be super neato to try a controller-driven car in a very large, empty parking lot (and probably with an Xbox controller with triggers that have long travel distances, as opposed to a Sixaxis with very short travel distances for the buttons), but the feedback issues sound convincing. Clearly something for the bored hobbyist rather than mass production. Thanks for indulging my, uh, drive of fancy.
posted by chrominance at 6:08 PM on September 10, 2007

You've never actually used a Playstation controller to play one of the more realistic driving games, have you? It's not an improvement over the traditional controls at all; quite the contrary. Lack of feedback, too difficult to modulate over the controller's range, (a playstation 2 joystick is graduated in 256ths, but it's very hard to not simply slam it to the end of its range), too small, too easy to drop it or otherwise accidentally lose control of it.

In fact, for those driving games, they sell wheels and pedals as controllers. They work better.
posted by ikkyu2 at 6:20 PM on September 10, 2007

GM drive by wire (YouTube link; watch it quick, as YouTube appears to be pulling Top Gear videos in response to copyright complaints from the BBC).
posted by flabdablet at 7:15 PM on September 10, 2007

"GM drive by wire (YouTube link; watch it quick, as YouTube appears to be pulling Top Gear videos in response to copyright complaints from the BBC)."
posted by flabdablet at 10:15 PM on September 10 [+] [!]

And if it just had wings, I couldn't buy it, either, in 50 years... But another fascinating design exercise from the people that crushed all their EV1s.

Interesting link, though, flabdablet. Thanks.
posted by paulsc at 7:52 PM on September 10, 2007

Many modern cars have "drive by wire" accelerators. When you press down on the gas, it just sends a command to the car's computer, which then feeds more air and gas in. (This allows nifty tricks like altering the fuel/air mix depending on how fast you're mashing down on the pedal, and whether the car is in "sport" or "economy" mode, etc.)

I think the biggest thing stopping the other controls from moving to electronic controls, or keeping the gas pedal on the floor (instead of via some other control method), is "why?"

Sure, you could make the brakes DBW as well, but there's no reason to. It would just create unnecessary complexity that doesn't currently exist. Same for steering.

And if you wanted to replicate the driving experience, you'd need to have a mechanism for force-feedback as well as driver commands. And once you got that done, you'd need to deal with latency and resolution and fault-tolerance and safe failure modes. They're not un-solvable problems, but you don't go looking for them when you don't need them.

For a philosophically-related (to an engineer, anyway) problem, I'm drawn to the market failure of Remington's "electric ignition" system for hunting rifles. They had what was on paper a very good idea: replace the mechanical firing pin from a gun with an electric system. With the trigger nothing more than a switch, you could redesign the gun any way you wanted. It could completely change firearms design. Except it never caught on: you don't go replacing a system that works, on the whole, really, really well, and has been carefully optimized over the course of centuries, with some new and unproven system, unless there's a really pressing reason to.

Like the mechanical firing pin and primer, the steering wheel / brake pedal combo may have begun from some arbitrary decisions, but they have evolved today into something that works very well for what they need to do. Where there is an advantage in changing them, they'll be changed (as in the gas pedal), but until then, they'll stay the same.

I'm not trying to be anti-progress here, but some things are done the way they are, not because people just hate change, but because that's exactly the way they need to be.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:49 PM on September 10, 2007

I think the biggest thing stopping the other controls from moving to electronic controls, or keeping the gas pedal on the floor (instead of via some other control method), is "why?"

BMW offers steer-by-wire on several (all?) of their cars. The advantage is that steering can be highly non-linear. At low speed (parallel parking), a given motion turns the front wheels more than at high speed. This could be exaggerated for parallel parking, but I don't think BMW actually does that.

Mitsubishi and other Japanese makers had all-wheel steering in the mid-to-late '90s. Typically the rear wheels would turn in the same direction as the front at high speed to make lane-changes smoother. At low speeds, they would go in the opposite direction, making turning faster and more efficient (tires aligned with the direction of travel, so less wear). I assume the Japanese systems were electronic or electro-hydraulic.

Sure, you could make the brakes DBW as well, but there's no reason to. It would just create unnecessary complexity that doesn't currently exist. Same for steering.

Brakes are somewhat DBW if you have systems like ABS and traction control. Your foot is just one of many inputs.
posted by b1tr0t at 9:48 PM on September 10, 2007

Mendel: Every year there's a dozen-odd newspaper stories about (usually elderly) people hitting the accelerator when they mean to brake...

Precisely why a more intuitive interface would be a good idea! Pushing your foot forward to go forward, but then moving your foot over and pushing it forward again to stop, and then moving this stick over there and moving your foot again and pushing it forward again to go backward, is just silly.

The automatic transmission freed us from involvement in the clutching and shifting details, so that more throttle pressure simply equates to more acceleration. Now we have the technology to take it the rest of the way: Merging throttle, gear, and brake into a single "automatic speed" would eliminate the pedal confusion that kills so many people.

I grew up pushing the joystick forward to accelerate and pulling it back to decelerate (or accelerate in reverse). When I learned to drive a real car, the archaic pedal setup drove me nuts. I'm sure it made sense to Karl Benz in 1885, but we're past that now. I guess I shouldn't be optimistic, because we're still typing on QWERTY keyboards.

Davejay: Oh, and if I sneezed while driving, I'd certainly want a big steering wheel to damped that movement, versus a thumbstick sending me off the road.

This can go both ways. For most game controllers, you're quite right, a twitch translates into a big uncontrolled motion. And this answers Chrominance's question. However, a redesigned controller could improve on the spurious-input situation, compared to the current wheel and pedals, simply because as inertia flings you around the passenger compartment, you exert force on those controls while trying to keep yourself in the seat, and that might not be the input you want to give the car!

Suppose your arms and legs could be dedicated to holding your body down, and vehicle control could be accomplished solely with fingers. But like today's setup, where symmetric motions on both inputs (like a sneeze convulsion that tenses both arms) cancel out, you could eliminate much of the potential for accidental inputs through careful control design. I don't see it happening with today's video game controllers, but a thoughtful DBW design could reduce the tendency for people who reflexively shove their feet forward while bracing for impact to inadvertently accelerate into a crash.
posted by Myself at 1:42 AM on September 11, 2007

In fact, for those driving games, they sell wheels and pedals as controllers. They work better.

I do think the jury's out on this a bit; it's more realistic, sure, but I've tried them and they aren't necessarily better. (Only in Gran Turismo 4, though, and I'm one of those people that doesn't bother with manual transmissions in Gran Turismo so there's one less input.) Plus I've known people who owned wheel/pedal combos and found them a bit of a bear to set up and use, and actually preferred the controller most of the time.

Which is not to say that I think a controller would be better for driving than a wheel/pedal combo. I was just wondering if there were major problems with a controller setup that would prevent its use, or if it'd just be horrendously difficult to drive, or if actually it wouldn't be half-bad.
posted by chrominance at 7:38 PM on September 11, 2007