Can the Internet Drive a Car?

Anyone who followed the saga of Red, as he tried to get through the Rocket Hideout in "Twitch Plays Pokemon" earlier this year (and, by all accounts, it was a lot of you), knows that it's hard to get thousands of people to perform complex tasks, like playing a video game, as one. So, why not throw caution into the wind and let the internet drive a car?

Fortunately for our nation's drivers, pedestrians, pets, and wildlife, it's not a real car. But the premise behind Twitch Plays Pokemon—crowdsourcing something that is generally best done by a single person—is being used for the Internet Drives an RC Car, a new project started by a team of engineers working for eBay in Florida.

Just like Twitch Plays Pokemon, commands input via a chat window control the RC car you see on screen—but these are real-life RC cars housed in a Florida office, that are set up on a real (albeit kind of basic) track. Right now, there are two cars that can be controlled—the idea is that they will race.

Basically, the chat system takes into account all of the "votes" for how a given car will move, then averages it out over the last 2.5 seconds (in Twitch Plays Pokemon, dozens of votes were coming in each second). The "vote" that wins determines how the car moves next—either forward, backward, or diagonally via an Arduino micro controller, which basically takes the inputs from a laptop and bypasses the cars' remote controls.

"Twitch Plays Pokemon is exactly what inspired it. We were interested in seeing how the wisdom of the crowd comes together and tells the car what to do," Sam Deford, one of the engineers who worked on the project, told me. "Will it be complete chaos or will the chat voting come together to reach a consensus and have the car move around in a sensible fashion?"

Anyone who watched Twitch Plays Pokemon for even a few minutes would probably bet on the former. That game was plagued with trolls and spammers—popular memes popped up about how Red (the game's character) was tormented by inner demons because of how chaotically he moved through the map and how long it took to beat even simple parts of the game. But, eventually, the internet (and Red) persevered, and the game was conquered.

In that sense, there's not going to be a clear way of measuring success in the Internet Drives an RC Car—they're real RC cars and the track is small. Instead, we'll probably see people hop on for a bit, control the car, and then leave. But it'll be interesting to see whether or not people can successfully navigate the spiral track without crashing the cars into the barriers dozens of times (as I did when I tested it out—I am not a great RC car driver, apparently).

When I took it for a spin, there were no other people in the chatroom, because it hadn't been officially launched yet. But once it starts going, I'd imagine things will be much more chaotic. Take it for a spin when you have a chance.