Gadgetory

this is what we were promised a drone that can follow you down a mountain without crashing in 2015 the Lilly drone raised 34 million dollars on the strength of this video which shows a guy just throwing it up in the air and having it follow him down a hill snowboarding thing is it wasn't true this video wasn't shot with Lilly drone at all it turned out and the technology wasn't capable of following you like that three years ago a $2,500 drone that can actually follow me around so let me show you what that looks like with some footage from the sky do r1 itself this is one of the very first clips I shot with the sky diao and it's a little bit tame to start but this is still not somewhere I generally fly a drone there's a lot of trees overhead I'm on the sidewalk where I'm not supposed to be riding anyhow and of course I'm not controlling the drone at all it's just letting it follow me I don't have any way to tell whether it's doing the right thing until I watch the video afterwards you might notice I'm giving you a nice long clip here just to show you that we're not cherry-picking the best moments the sky do did all of this itself and here we go underneath the arch oh god I love this shot and you get the cherry blossoms in the view and it's following me around this apartment complex even though I'm dodging through the trees I'm under the cherry blossoms have you ever seen a shot like this with a drone before it's not something you typically get it's not something you typically trust your equipment to do because it might crash into something here was another early test I've got the sky do following me a bit trying to see how it's predictive tracking system works it uses the cameras and a bit of software processing to figure out where you might go so even if you dodge around behind a tree or something like that it can figure out where you're likely to be next and follow you it's also got the ability to climb up way up high if you like you want to get a different perspective it doesn't always have to be right down behind you this was a speed test I was trying to sky do to see if it can catch up with me if it could follow me I'm going full speed on the road bike there's also a lead mode which I really like since he's got cameras front and back you can have a fly around in front of you you can wave up at the camera have it capture all kinds of stunts that way you might be wondering how this all works the sky do has 13 cameras on the top every corner and on the bottom two in each place so that it can kind of stitch together a map of the world around you a three-dimensional map where it knows where all the obstacles are it's a technique called slam and it's similar to something that self-driving cars use right now oh yes the foliage okay so I took this to a park nearby my house so I could see how it can handle dense foliage and did pretty well I don't know if I like all the blown highlights here it definitely had some trouble with the bright Sun coming down through the trees and still trying to capture the dark regions underneath but it's pretty great and this is somewhere I would never ever fly a drone normally you trust a drone to come back to you to try up in the sky oh yes that's right sky dia warns that it can't always dodge little tiny thin branches like that and I'll show you a bit more that later I don't know if I really like this shot I like the blue skies but it's a little bit dim and gloomy on the ground I do like that it's got this program where I can orbit around me and kind of get you that 360 without even trying so it's pretty good at not hitting people which I like but it does still startle them I got a lot of weird looks with this drone walking around the street taking it places that you wouldn't normally take drones and a couple people gave me the evil eye and then I've also got an issue here this is where I discovered this the first time I discovered that the drone can't always follow you through all kinds of narrow passageways at the Jeep that couldn't follow me past the Jeep was a little bit confused and I think in a sec you're gonna see as it rounds the corner it's not gonna follow me here either it just doesn't know what to do the cameras they look left they look right they're like there's not enough space to get through here and it doesn't follow me so you have to come back and get it so there'll be these times where I couldn't quite trust it to follow me through all the things I was doing if you got a space that's wide open you can just you don't even have to look at it you can trust it to do its thing most of the time but if if there's an obstacle if there's anywhere where it's like it's not sure what to do you might look behind you and realize it's gone this is where I really put the sky dia through its paces I found a mountain biker on the mount up on that tall mountain mountain Uma home I think it's called up in San Jose and I said go for it let's see if we can follow the sky do in this mountain path with all the shrubbery and honestly it did a pretty damn good job it has a little trouble if you go too fast up the more obstacles in the way the more chance it's gonna get confused and not be able to follow you after you're going really quickly and this is out okay so watch this this is where I really got a little bit concerned I realized that it wasn't quite what I wanted in a drone yet this isn't this is the biggest limitation of the of the tracking system so far if it does lose you it might go around and try to find you again and then hit something if you're in an area with those thin branches again it didn't see those thin branches hit the obstacle and that was the end of oh yeah this is a definitely borderline for what the tracking system can do it was starting to lose track of me there it was a little bit shaky as I made that transition from dark to light this time I was able to make it cuz it still had a good glimpse of me the entire time but going through was able to follow me through the tunnel the sky do still got a lot of limitations for a $2,500 drone it's not something you can just fit into your back pocket throw up in the air and forget about and it's not exactly a filmmakers either since it doesn't have dedicated manual controls but it is the beginning of the realization of that dream that the lily drone made us believe in and I wouldn't be surprised if four or five years from now every child has these features every drone could theoretically follow you around