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In a parallel universe there's a version of this piece that uses pot delivery as it's example.
When I was kid we had to go to people's houses to buy our drugs. Like animals.
has the same idea. Prices are dropping and more and more variety of models are coming onto the market. Drones that fit in your palm? Check. With cameras? Check. Drones that follow you down the slopes? Check. Drones that can fly circle interesting things
Mike Lord quotes:
It depends on what you're trying to do... flying is an important part of composing shots
waypoints -- set waypoints and then go back, smoother flying between points,
allows you to pan the camera while the drone does the flying (course lock -- point the drone in a direction and it stays in that direction, gives you the ability to have a continues tracking shot, while you manipulate the camera to keep an object in the center, i.e. flying by a property)
I don't feel comfortable having so little control. As a photographer I don't see any advantage to not being able to see what you're doing. All of this just trying to cut corners when you're trying to learn to fly a drone. Just go out and practice and learn how to fly your drone.
Point of interest stuff is cool, you can fly up and away while circling.
To get the highest quality shots you're always going to want one pilot and one photographer.
Solving problems that don't exist.
The course line and course lock allow me to do things that I could not do before.
evolve the follow me feature, something with a wristband perhaps. If you're snowboarding you don't want to carry anything.
Collision avoidance and situational self awareness. Avoiding crashing is still the hardest part of flying and none of the automation so far addresses that. One of the most fun parts is flying it and you;re always going to be more adaptive and smarter than a series of waypoints.
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Frank Kivo quotes
I actually had a chance to get out with Lance Knowles and George Mosko of Monster-X to try out their new avoidance detection system in the Bahamas. It was so helpful. With a tropical storm forming, we were constantly getting blown around and with a common consumer drone, we would have lost it, I'm sure.
Waypoint automation is extremely helpful for covering large parcels of land. When we take on properties of 300-600 acres, it would be a blessing to plan a flight path ahead of time. This would help us get our survey shots in and also use these to plan our more intimate shots, which we will either gather on the ground, or with tighter flying with a drone.
I think these automated and new system implementations are extremely helpful and useful, depending on the industry you’re working in. I know that many folks in the oil and energies industries have hired full-time drone operators to survey and secure large pieces of land they may have a well on. These operators solely rely on waypoints and geographical data to make their surveys.
The follow me system, to me, is sort of a biography tool; only useful in high octane sport activities or for an overkill "selfie." In a professional filmmaker tool kit, it doesn't make sense. We stay behind the camera, we don't have it follow us.
The one downside of automation is you cannot teach automation emotion. There is no way to teach a waypoint system to capture the beautiful sun flares that come into camera for that split second. You need to be able to know when to break out of the automated flight system, capture what you need, and then have the ability to resume your flight path. That would be a very cool feature implementation.
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I asked about sending the drone back, and she comes at me with this. What
do you think? It is interesting, or do you just want it out of your life?
If you do want to look at it, I don't think there's necessarily a review
in it. But maybe a trend story? Something about how much easier flying is,
where you just press a button? I dunno, maybe that's old news. But with
Parrot's push-button take-off/landing, 3DR Solo's "follow me," and now
this feature, it seems like this is all moving quickly toward total
automation. It might be pushing it to try to make a news story out of it.
But I dunno, you know all this stuff better than me. Is that old news?
You can also say yes to the add-on, try it out and use it for your
business, then I tell them that you don't want to write about it.
But maybe it won't fit in the hippie-van.
Great, I'll ask her to ship it to Holman Ave.
Maybe that's the trend story: the next big step in drone tech is obstacle
detection. You just need 2 or 3 interviews with people who have skin in
the game, and you can write a tidy story about the challenges the experts
are dealing with.
I know it's not the type of thing you were super-stoked on before you
started just doing reviews, but it's an easy one. We did this in January,
but maybe there's new news and we could provide an update:
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/autopilot-tech-total-game-changer-drones/
Anyway, I bet you'll think of better ideas after you fly this!
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