Poll on cameras used while driving

Poll seems mighty close.

 

Cockpit view.

 

Always Cockpit.

 

only cockpit, without wheel, minimal display info, always trying to reach the most realistic experience, even i ask my wife to throw me insects in the helmet when i drive in a formula car...err... well...the last part is a joke

 

You should try putting a fan right on your face to simulate aerodynamic effects

 

@kimbo u need this

 

Amazing!!!

 

Cockpit view only

 

[QUOTE="I do not understand the reason why people use another type of camera to play a motorsport simulation game.[/QUOTE]

Well, that's easy. In a single monitor, hood camera gives you more visibility. When you not set FOV and seat height well enough, two thirds of the screen shows car interiors, and little get left to the track itself. In hood cam, it's the opposite, you have almost all screen showing track and opponents.
Another point is: since the hood camera is always in a central position, the driver can see and attack corners from both left and right with more confidence. That's especially useful when you have little experience in simracing leagues, don't have position awareness yet, and don't want to wreck your opponents.
Important to notice that a "videogamer" usually uses the awful swingman camera, and when he decides to get your feet wet with simracing, cockpit seems too restrictive. So hood cam is the first step from a racing arcade game to simulation.

I believe it's a matter of time, for the engaged simracer, to switch from hood to cockpit cam when he feels ready. Cockpit camera, that's where the real fun is

 

I mostly use a T-cam or a bonnet camera depending on the particular car or how the particular game handles the camera. I do, though, switch between all the camera views for various reasons, including the cockpit view and (gasp!) the swingman camera. So, since I can choose only one for this poll, I’m choosing to represent the underdog: the swingman camera.

Whether it’s racing or some other genre, you're looking at the game world through what amounts to a relatively small picture frame. The vast majority of your peripheral vision is filled by the physical stuff in the room you’re sitting in.

Try it right now: while reading this, consider your peripheral vision. You probably see things like pictures on the wall, bookshelves, furniture, windows, etc. The smaller your screen or the further it is from your eyes, the more peripheral “noise” you have.

---
The camera views in any game serve one purpose: to convey the 3D game world to the player. The camera provides information about the world so that the player can absorb what’s happening and react accordingly.

Obviously, the swingman camera displays the most of the world, the cockpit camera the least, and the outside-of-the-car-but-still-attached-to-the-car cameras are somewhere in between. The swingman clearly has the least “connection” to the fine movements of the car, while the “attached” cameras are very much connected.

If you’re a hardcore sim racer, you probably immediately say that the cockpit camera is the only one a “serious” player would use. After all, it shows a picture of what the inside of a car looks like and you see the inside of car when you are actually driving, so it must be more realistic. If it’s perceived as being more realistic, naturally it’s more hardcore.

---
It wasn’t really until almost a year ago when I got a Vive that a major realization became cemented in my mind: none of these driving views are any more realistic than the others.

When you drive a real car, obviously you’re sitting in a seat behind the wheel. You’re not sitting on the hood or flying behind like a kite.

In VR, the cockpit view is more than just a “view”; it’s a very convincing representation of how it really looks to sit in and drive a real car. Your head isn’t locked into a strange (mostly) forward-only position like a normal cockpit view. You can look around a fully 3D car interior. You feel like you are there.

It is truly striking and is something you have to experience. No video conveys what it’s like.

The cockpit “view” is simply the most natural way to do it in VR, and I’ll bet that even the “Playstation videogamers” who might normally use swingman on the TV would immediately go to a cockpit position while in VR and feel just as natural and in-control.

---
Still, you have to choose one of the camera views. The “best” one is the one that allows you personally to best interact with the world. If you feel like you can interact with the world better with 25% or more of the screen blocked by cockpit graphics, more power to you. If you feel more in-control while sailing along behind the car like a kite, go for it.

On a regular screen, I default to the middle: the expanded view of the T-cam with its solid connection to the car.

If you’re on a single monitor, you can use FOV, virtual seat position, or things like TrackIR to maximize the benefits your chosen camera view. I’ve never used triple-screens, but I imagine it’s the closest thing to an inside-the-car kind of experience outside of VR.

I think the poll, though, has something to do with camera views and audio. My two-cents is that the car engine sound is pretty weak in swingman. Just because I’m flying 15 feet behind, doesn’t mean I want it to sound like it’s far away!

Also, the default angle of the T-cams are too pointed-at-the-ground to be useful at lower FOVs. I (tediously) manually edit mine, but it would be nice if they were all just pointed up a little by default.


.

 

@Lorencini
I understand your point of view. I use 1 monitor and I've always used the cockpit view since first day, even when I had a 14-inch monitor, but I understand people using another type of camera when they are beginners, but that's not what I see here in Brazil. For example, the biggest winner of online championships here in Brazil uses a hood camera.

I understand when the person only uses another type of camera to have fun, but for competition with others players in a simulation game I really think it's very "strange".

 

I suppose the heart of the topic, for me, is that the scale doesn’t go from “serious and competitive” to “frivolous and just-for-fun” when considering these camera views. Instead, the metric has developed into two categories: “camera views on a monitor” and “being inside the virtual world”.

I think I’ve always held the opinion that these monitor-based camera views all share the same fault to varying degrees. They are all subject to the natural restrictions of essentially being a picture in a frame in my home, surrounded in my visual field by other things in my home. This was even before VR was a thing; it was just a feeling I had.

Once I got my own VR setup, my suspicions were confirmed. It took me out of the surroundings of this room and placed me in a “real” car at a “real” location. Assertions that one monitor-based view was for serious grown-ups while another view was for silly children became quaint.

I do still race on a monitor, of course. Not all the racing games I like support VR. Even the ones that do still get as much time on my monitor instead. As striking as VR is, it can be somewhat exhausting (for me, anyway). The hyper-stimulation of my full visual field kind of freaks-out my brain after a while.

Even though I have a much larger monitor now, I still use the same tricks to get the most out of the experience that I did when I started racing on a 15” CRT almost exactly twenty years ago.

I scoot it up closer to my eyes and I try to minimize peripheral “noise” by reducing the amount of junk physically surrounding the monitor. I then choose a camera view and FOV that gives me, personally, satisfactory information about the game world and what my car is doing, and then I proceed to have lots of fun.

I don’t get “I’m-a-serious-sim-racer” feelings from the way the picture looks on my screen, but I do still enjoy the more “inside baseball” aspects of racing that are wholly separate from the view on the screen, i.e. ideal racing lines, proper heel-toe downshifting, etc.

I do often switch to cockpit view on a monitor (especially with open-wheel cars), but for me, that is my just-for-fun view. If I want to race “seriously”, I use one of the more open views. Just as the local champion mentioned above uses a bonnet cam, I suspect there are silent high-level racers out there using swingman. You never know!


.

 

I went through this kind of evolution process by myself. I few years ago i was driving with hood cam only. My monitor wasn't that big, and i didn't feel comfortable in cockpit view, because of the very restricted sight. It felt like driving while looking through a mailbox slot. Also because of a very bad FOV setting.

Well ..... time as changed. The urge for more immersion got stronger. After constantly upgrading my racing equipment incl. a bigger monitor, the step to driving in cockpit view was just a logical move.
Now i'm driving in cockpit view only, and with calculated FOV (even on my single screen). Everything else feels wrong now.

Nevertheless ..... i'm not strictly saying, that cockpit cam is the only realistic view, which a simracer should use. It also depends on your simracing setup. I'd say that cockpit cam isn't the most realistic view for someone, which is sitting 2-3 meters away from a TV screen. Then hood cam should give a more proper view, because of the big distance between seat and screen. And in some other cases a well-made windscreen/dashboard cam is a realistic view as well.

At the end it's all a question of personal preference and the level of immersion you want.