Hacker Cinema
Take Me to Titanic
2022 · Film · 43 min
A group of fee-paying adventurers travel to the bottom of the ocean in an innovative submersible, hoping to explore the world's most famous wreck, the Titanic. The expedition also hopes to gain new insights into deep sea biodiversity around the wreck site.
1 negativefrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
2 comments on Hacker News
. Edit: The bit mentioned above is at 0:37 in this video: https://youtu.be/ClkytJa0ghc?t=37 - "we keep a couple of spares on board just in case", that's great but I'm wondering who in that sub knows how to pair an ancient Logitech gamepad and remap XInput like a kid playing Diablo.
They don't, in the BBC Travel episode "Take Me to Titanic" about this team and their sub, they did a dive with customers and almost had to abort because the controllers stopped working.
Then, when they reached the bottom of the sea, they were stuck going around in circles on the sea floor because the keymappings on the controllers stopped working. They almost had to abort the dive until someone on the surface had troubleshooted the issue and found out that the keys were incorrectly mapped to the sub's controls.
It turned out that the 'left' direction key on the gamepad actually mapped to the 'forward' motion of the submarine, and all of the gamepad controls were incorrectly mapped.
They only found out about the incorrect mapping after a dozen hours underwater and once they reached the seafloor.
It was amateur hour from the get-go.
There was a BBC special on this submarine, and it features that $30 Logitech gamepad extensively.
At one point they were at the bottom of the sea and the gamepad just stops working, as in the mapping of the gamepad keys to the controls of the sub weren't working correctly. They were stuck spinning around in circles on the sea floor.
The owner, on a boat in the middle of the ocean, had to call whoever it was that set up the gamepad for him on a cell phone, while his team and customers were at the bottom of the ocean, to figure out how the gamepad worked. That person never answered. They eventually troubleshoot it and find out that 'left' on the gamepad was actually forward in real life and all of the keys were mapped incorrectly.
The software that they depended on was just as buggy as you'd expect, and having watched the BBC special, I would never get in any submersible that this team designed or touched.
BBC Special Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLI9SpUDdwo
BBC Special Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLOhOAJV5II
edit: apparently they were made private. You can find the show here on BBC Travel's website, they're the "Take Me to Titanic" episodes:
Part 1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001d2ml
Part 2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001d7b6
Some other horrors from the episodes if you can't access them:
- They didn't have navigation systems on the sub, so they were basically dead reckoning and trying to confirm their location with their team at the ocean's surface.
- They lost control multiple times.
- There were multiple incidents where they almost aborted the trip 16+ hours into it.
- It looked like they didn't even have voice or video communication with their team at the surface, they were communicating using text on what looked like an 1990's AIM client.
- It looked like everything was rigged together with consumer hardware, using older versions of Windows and custom software.