Image: Screengrab from YouTube
Growing up, I always found it much easier to smoke the competition in Gran Turismo or Need for Speed while looking down on my car from above, in third-person view. Somehow, I always ended up running into walls or taking wrong turns in the first-person view—maybe it's because I had never driven a car.Never did I think, however, that it would be possible to actually drive a car while looking down at it from the sky, like I did in all of those games.But that's exactly the situation British TV personality Tom Scott recently created, rigging first-person view goggles to a drone that hovered above a car. Like that camera Lakitu in Super Mario 64, Scott had drone pilots follow around a Mazda at a course in the UK while two drivers sat behind the wheel wearing the goggles. The goggles beamed an overhead view back to the drivers, so they were essentially playing a video game, but one that took place in real life.As you can see, Paul and Oli have a bit of trouble navigating the course, proving that they're either pretty bad at racing video games or that the human psyche just isn't up to take the real-life risks we often see in Mario Kart and countless other games.It's not exactly a 100 percent faithful recreation of the video game experience—as you can see, the video was a bit grainy, and it's certainly different actually being in the car you're driving rather than just controlling it on the screen. "Your brain just isn't wired for this," Scott told one of the competitors.Either way, it's a pretty amazing idea, and both competitors manage to navigate the course without too much difficulty (albeit pretty slowly). Where do I sign up?