Something else that's hard to appreciate until you try - is how much you turn your head when you drive.
Most off-the-shelf wireless cameras you can buy have a fairly narrow field-of-view; that is, the view left-to-right (and up-and-down), as an angle, the camera can see. Your eyeball, held steady (and discounting peripheral vision), has a FOV of about 60-70 degrees horizontal, and about 45 degrees vertical. With peripheral vision, those angles increase greatly.
Most cameras FOVs are smaller than the human eye's, somewhere around 40 degrees or so is typical, sometimes even less depending on how cheap the camera is. What this means is that what you see thru it isn't the "whole" picture.
Driving around an RC car using such a camera is going to be very difficult; imagine trying to drive a real car, but you can't turn your head, and you have blinders on, so your field of view is restricted to less than your peripheral vision (peripheral vision is very important in vision, by the way). In a real car it would not only be difficult, but very dangerous.
In an RC car, what is likely to happen is that you will run into objects, you will misjudge turns (and run into things), and you won't be able to easily back up. This is an issue with any remotely operated vehicle/machine, which is why you often see several solutions to overcome it:
- Multiple cameras
- Cameras with wider FOVs (fisheye or wide-angle lenses)
- Pan/Tilt mechanisms for the cameras
- Other sensors, like LIDAR, IR, sonar, radar, etc
For a project of your scale, if you can't afford to add a pan/tilt system (though it is fairly easy to do with a couple of extra servos, which can be controlled from the arduino), I would add a lens to the camera to widen its FOV - a simple fisheye lens from a good quality door peephole device (cheap at the hardware store) would work perfectly.
Adding this (and you might want a second camera with a similar lens for reverse!) will greatly enhance how well you can drive the car; keep it in mind as you build the car and try it out, you will find that without it steering will be challenging as I mentioned, and once you add it, it becomes easier. If you can add a pan/tilt mechanism, things can become interesting depending on how far you want to take the project; for instance, you could add a head-tracking system, and an HMD, to remotely control the pan/tilt device, and gain (in the HMD) a "virtual presence" (called "telepresence" actually) that can make it feel as if you are "there" instead of "here"...
Good luck with your project!
