Gadgetory

doll Bell here for cnet.com giving a first look at the parrot bebop drone this is a small lightweight quadcopter due out this year at an undisclosed time for an undisclosed price we've got a camera on the front here that captures a raw 14 megapixel image and then processes that down to be 2 megapixel footage can capture both still images and HD video content a neat trick here with the camera is that it's a fixed camera so you're not dealing with the weight and the intricate delicate system of a gimbal on the bottom of this thing like we've seen in some other quad copters use a fixed camera with a fixed fisheye lens and by using that fisheye lens it can reprocess the image inside the camera so that you can kind of tilt it around capture the image you want I play around with it but without the camera actually moving at all so that's a neat trick and it helps cut down on some weight and on makes a design a little bit more sturdy some other interesting things to know about here you've got a replaceable battery pack each battery pack will give you what I've been told about 12 minutes of flight time which is about average for something as small as this got built-in GPS and with that GPS you can use the app on iPhone iPad Android tablet you can use the app to navigate a flight path that will fly you can use the GPS on here to trigger to automatically return back to you if you're a little bit confused about which way is forward and which way is backward on the controls itself that's a neat feature we've seen that some other a quadcopter some competing products too but it's nice that pair is including that on here another interesting feature that Paris built in here that's the first I've seen is that it will automatically detect if there's something intruding on the propellers so say you've got a finger in here it's going to automatically detect that and shut down all the propellers so that you're not going to get totally named that's a good feature to have really the whole system is designed to be flown indoors as well as outdoors you're flying this indoors there's a pair of bumpers that attach this that it's not going to you know bump the propellers you fly into a wall you fly it into the ceiling so that helps protect the propellers the hope is controlled over Wi-Fi using a tow 2.11 n or AC that's going to be communicated to your tablet either an Android tablet or iPad you want some extra range or some more advanced controls they're also selling a remote-control rig that kind of docks your tablet and also extends your Wi-Fi range and also has the benefit of being able to integrate with an oculus rift or they were just generically saying some kind of video goggle system with that you can get a literal bird's-eye view of what you're seeing through the camera and be able to control the camera tilt with your head really cool again we don't have pricing on this we don't know when it's coming out this year but we are told it's coming out in 2014 so that is a first look at the parrot bebop drone a very cool lightweight quadcopter that I'm excited to see this year Tina calm and doll