[Swampdude]

I had this idea a year or 2 ago and thought it could be a big hit if done right. Since I never got serious with it I thought I should throw it out there and see if anybody liked it or could do something with it.
Since various robot competitions are getting to be a big deal. What if you made a website that had online webcam competitions. Basically take a game like this years and set up a web gui interface to gain control over these "Real" bots. You have however many bots to choose from. People pay for however much time to drive these things to compete over the web. So you build a field, probably in a spare bedroom (something fairly small - since you have the advantage of scale). Then build these bots and mount cameras on them to feedback to the drivers interface. Also have an omni view of the playing field fed back over a split screen. The field would need to be managed by a person to reset, repair, score etc. requiring availability to be only certain hours of the day. Probably a good college experiment. Obviously there's a problem with the FPS and drivability of something like that but these days bandwidth is only getting better.
You might think people wouldn't pay for that, but you'd be surprised what people will pay for, especially nowadays over the internet. Plus the competition side of it will get addictive. Having running stats on users etc. This could probably be done with Lego's! Whadya think? Am I crazy or would you pay to compete with real bots online? Maybe just once just to try it out if it was cheap?