PCM Hack
Rennlist Member
Joined: Aug 2012
Posts: 8,147
Likes: 2,646
From: Pac NW
I saw this and was convinced it was faked too.... before even seeing the stories confirming it. Being a tech guy myself, I noticed that the hard part would have been mapping the image onto the screen, but that's not too hard with a rigidly mounted camera. But then I noticed his thumb moved over the image for a moment at about 3:02 in the video. I single-framed the video at that point and zoomed in on his thumb. You can see the masking artifacts from when his thumb passed over the image. In a natural image there would be no reason there should have been nearly black pixels at a few places around the edge of his thumb, most obviously around the 1:30 position (below the character's ear) or just above 9 o'clock... or the whole set of pixels from about 2 o'clock to 3 o'clock. This indicates the image never was really on the car screen but was applied in a post-process. He must have cursed himself for causing himself extra work by accidentally letting his thumb get in front of the image.
Nerd mission accomplished.
Nerd mission accomplished.
If it weren't for the fact that all of those controls are on separate CAN and LIN bus segments, it wouldn't be entirely impossible to do something like this for real. Would be interesting to know what OS the current-generation PCMs are running...
Race Car
Joined: Nov 2013
Posts: 4,071
Likes: 690
From: Austin, TX
Eh, those just look like JPEG artifacts to me. I assume he found a way to drive the LCD panel from an external VGA or DVI connection.
If it weren't for the fact that all of those controls are on separate CAN and LIN bus segments, it wouldn't be entirely impossible to do something like this for real. Would be interesting to know what OS the current-generation PCMs are running...
If it weren't for the fact that all of those controls are on separate CAN and LIN bus segments, it wouldn't be entirely impossible to do something like this for real. Would be interesting to know what OS the current-generation PCMs are running...
So searching for other possibly clearer evidence just for grins, he really shows his hand at 2:49. If you single frame through the video, just as the car seat moves over the bottom of the screen, he drops a few frames of the video so that he doesn't have to deal with masking the video over the edge of the car seat as it moves up over the screen. However, he doesn't clip quite enough frames and actually reveals the top of the screen as being blank in the following frame. In the first image, you see the screen is reasonably well lit just before the seat moves up onto it. You should still see the top of that in the next frame but it disappears. There are no other small drops like this I can find elsewhere in the video, so it must have been for a reason.
If you single step through the frames, you'll see that the video jumps a few frames where he cut out the masking problem. However, the next frame reveals the top of the screen as being blank. Here is a zoomed in image of the frame just before the cut frames and the clear jump in the video, then the frame right after that.
Last edited by StormRune; Feb 23, 2017 at 10:13 AM.
Race Car
Joined: Nov 2013
Posts: 4,071
Likes: 690
From: Austin, TX
I forgot just one more interesting tidbit. This video was filmed near where this guy appears to work here in Austin at Indeed.com. Someone id'ed the building in the thread about this in Reddit and the creator of the video confirmed it. He also had this response to questions about the authenticity of the video, quoting:
"And to answer everyone's number one question, is it a real video: Yes, it really is a video."
"And to answer everyone's number one question, is it a real video: Yes, it really is a video."
