Gadgetory

in this day and age people are pretty familiar with the idea of a consumer drone but even today the general concept of a drone remains pretty much the same you need a wide open space and you need a remote control to fly your drone in and you probably need some pilot experience to make sure you don't hurt anybody and wreck your device in the process that is not the case with the sky dor one instead the device uses an array of cameras sensors and a powerful on-board computer to map its surroundings predict where it's going next and avoid people and inanimate objects essentially this drone flies itself all of the times the company thinks it's going to be an action sport enthusiasts dream come true of course hearing those claims we felt like we had to put it through its paces so we brought the r-12 apart just outside of San Francisco so we could test its abilities in three different situations hiking skateboarding and biking we wanted to see how well the r1 can avoid obstacles like trees whether it can keep up and film stable 4k at high speeds and how well it adapts to changes in its environment so the study our one is pretty simple basically all you need is the drone itself and a flat surface to let it take off from and a battery plugs in right after that everything is taken care of on the mobile app what's surprising about the r1 is how fluid it feels it's not stopping and starting and trying to calibrate or locate you it basically has it has an image of you all the time it's tracking you all throughout the environment with all of its cameras and sensors and then it's just following you in a very fluid almost natural way sky dia says that's because the drone is predicting where it's going to go all the time now it's time to try a second activity biking as you can see here once it takes off all you need to do is tap on the image of your face from the live camera feed and the drun snaps into position and then it follows you wherever you go it's important to note that the camera sensor on the r-1 isn't the absolute best the drones camera lacks dynamic range and you can set up color profiles which would help in post-processing and despite being 4k the overall quality isn't as good as what you get on a DJI with some graininess and noise that you might not be able to catch with the video previews on the mobile app but you can definitely see when you blow it up full screen on your computer so biking with the sky do our one went well but that was basically one static camera angle so we're here in a skate park in Balboa in San Francisco to see if the r-1 can keep up with lots of changing camera angles luckily the company is built in a number of different shooting modes so the sky do r1 can keep up with you from either following you from the front following you from the side it can even orbit in one giant 360 let's give it a shot here's to be struggling a little bit with the speed going around the skatepark and because it's such a tight area but it hasn't hit anything and it pretty much recalibrates itself very quickly oh wait I think I was following you so we ran into a couple issues of the r1 here at the skatepark for one I started following Viren instead of following me so because the art one basically tracks you the shape of your body and as you go around an environment it can get a little bit mixed up if it sees somebody else that looks similar to you and then it'll start following that person instead the whole point of the art one is that anyone can use it I'm not an experienced pilot myself I've only barely flown drones from say DJI but I was able to use the r1 right out of the box there are a few compromises with the r1 it's an action sports drone but it's not waterproof so it'd be really risky to take it skiing it would be even riskier to take it surfing it also doesn't have a micro SD card slot like some other drones from DJI but it does have 64 gigabytes of on-board storage that's probably more than enough for the 16 minute battery life you get on a single charge so if you're a photographer or a videographer and you really want cool aerial shots or say you just like piloting drones because it's really fun the r1 is probably not for you and also it's $2,500 that's a lot of money for a drone and it's also being ham assembled in Mountain View California where the company's headquarters are that means it's basically only for the early adopters right now that said drones as smart as these they're gonna get better they're gonna get cheaper and they're gonna get even smarter down the line and Scotty o has proven that it's at the front of the pack oh my god Shane Brooke well a chain just fell off but the drones find them