Can you drive forwards but face backwards.
I loved captain Scarlett.
Let me first clarify that statement. Not in a deep and meaningful way. I don't wish to marry him, but as a 10 year old 90's boy I would watch Captain Scarlett and the Mysterons religiously when I got home from school on a Friday. The best of it was it would switch from that to Thunderbirds and then Stingray between sessions so there was always a fix of Supermarionation (It's a real thing) on the TV. There were many many questions as a kid that stemmed from these shows, should Thunderbird 5 actually be a Thunderbird since it wasn't a flying, floating or driving vehicle it was a space station, I mean where do we draw the line? could Earth have been a thunderbird since its a giant ball flying through space!. What was the deal with Marina from Sting ray? was she a mermaid person or a person mermaid, and a question which I have since discovered I'm not the only one to have asked was:
Was the car in Captain Scarlet - you know the one where you drive facing backwards, actually practical?!
Our friend Tom Scott from YouTube had a similar question (well actually the exact same question!) , however unlike me, he has some cool friends who make things. So first of all, before we go any further, watch the below video, then we can talk.
Ok all caught up?
Good. So there was some thing that struck me about that video, and it was Tom's inability to (initially) control the vehicle, despite it being a simple set of controls. Why was that? Well to understand that we need to understand the factors at play here.
- Visual cue - There are two primary sensors which allow us humans to walk upright and not fall over at the first sign of inertia, the first being sight. Sight helps us orientate ourselves by finding a horizon, determining if we are moving or not and the important part here, which direction are we moving in. Tom's sight in this example was telling him he was traveling backwards.
- The vestibular system - this is a series of several organs located in the inner ear, which provide information to the brain about your orientation. Each of the semicircular canals end in a space that has small hair cells in it. These spaces are called ampullae. Whenever we turn our head, the inner ear turns along with it. But it takes a very brief moment for the fluid in the semicircular canals and ampullae to move with our head too. This means that the sensory hair cells in the ear are bent by the “slow” fluid. The hair cells then send this information to the brain via nerves and voila! we detect movement. This is relevant to our situation because not only was tom being informed by his vision he was traveling in the wrong direction but also his vestibular system, which was screaming at his brain that it thought he might in-fact be going backwards.
The combined efforts of both systems had the effect of totally confusing Tom, couple that with the fact he was then having to concentrate on a relatively cognitive intense task and you have a perfect recipe for a driving experience akin to allowing your Gran to drive a 17 ton boat down your local canal... backwards.
Here is my next question: Could he have gotten good with practice.
The answer to this one is simple, with a very simple real world example. YES. Pilots face a similar problem when they encounter a 'spin' which is when an aircraft uncontrollably starts to spin out of control. In these conditions the pilots inner ear is going crazy as its being flung in all directions possible, and visual aid is useless. In these situations the pilots have to rely on there instrumentation to survive. Another pilot related example is when they are flying IFL or Instrument Flight Rules, with no visual aid, and sometimes confusing inner ear messages, pilots have to fly the plane by instruments only. The human brain is a very adaptive machine, so can be 'trained' to accept most things, for example training the brain to say, we are going to drive forwards but face backwards, and we are going to do it via an artificial visual aid, is exactly the same as saying we are going to fly a plane in total darkness using only artificial visual aids to guide us.
Delay in signal
There was something briefly mentioned which is worth putting out there as a curve ball in this late stage. The video feed would have been slightly delayed, not by much but enough to slightly retard reaction times at higher speeds, now the human brain is adaptive, but I think we hit the limit of reacting to a hazard before we even see it! One possible solution is mirrors, to convey a picture in real time to the driver (for those physics boffins out there, I am aware of the nanoscopic delay caused by bouncing photons off a reflective surface.. we are not talking about driving at 90 meters a second here..)
The summary
So I've talked about why it would initially be quite a challenge to drive a car forwards, facing backwards but over time and practice could actually become second nature like the guys in captain scarlet. I do wonder if to them it would be weird if they got into a regular car and started driving. The comparison to this in real world is that of pilots having to learn to ignore the visual and sensory systems and focus on instruments when flying planes at night. One thing I didn't touch upon was why anyone would, the reason for this is the research into the merits of crashing facing backwards although is present is a little lacking in its proof of concept or indeed proof in general, I may do a follow up on that later on.