Gadgetory

I had never flown a drone before honestly I didn't think I could take offs and landings are hard to figure out when you're just starting and that's to say nothing of power lines trees and every other obstacle out there any one of which would destroy my thousand dollar investment in an instant and that's the biggest reason that like most people I don't own a drone 3d robotics here's this kind of thing a lot it's a problem they set out to solve with solo the quadcopter drone they're announcing today and sure enough the software they built was smart enough to handle anything I threw at it even if you crash solo wolves solo is a thousand dollar quadcopter designed to capture Hollywood style movie footage with just a couple taps it takes off in lands with a button press the battery which takes an hour to charge gets you about 20 minutes in the air if you have a GoPro attached either via the basic frame or a separately sold gimbal you can stream live video to your phone or tablet the video shows up on the solo app which is also where you set up your shots and because solo is the first drone to fully integrate with GoPro you have total access to GoPros camera controls that means you can remotely start and stop recordings and change your frame rate and other settings all while you're in the air it's all possible because of twin Linux computers one in the drone and one in your controller that work together to make solo smarter than your average consumer UAV the first era of our industry was getting robust to fly it was super hard but we got there the next era was making them easier to fly more autonomy more you know more GPS even simpler controls the next era I think is not flying them at all you know making it so that as the product gets more sophisticated the users can become less sophisticated now when you're ready to fly then I am ready to fly ok this is also ready to fly apparently so I'm gonna go make sure my settings I can go to my vehicle settings I can check which color I want my LED lights to be in case my friends out there flying too I can check my performance so it's nice and chill right now good what I'm gonna do is just like the screen tells me tap and hold to spend the props good props are spinning press fly to take off so I have exactly press two buttons right armed and then I press upon to take off almost everything about flying this drone has been automated this is a machine that just works independently of my mistakes when I need an emergency break I just hit the pause button forcing the drone to stop and hover while it waits for my instructions I had no idea what the buttons and knobs of the controller actually did while I was flying but it thinks of the autopilot I never really worried that a wrong move on my part would cause a crash the autopilot is the hard thing of a drone right the plastics the motors the props that's not that hard the brains of the operation the autopilot that's what takes years of time to develop well the problem was that it was developed by a team of very accomplished engineers and for them like okay you just load the list of parameters you find this weird code name for this parameter and change a from point zero two three to 0.0037 and you know submit that to the drone and re-upload it and you're gonna feel it flies better ok well that needs to become settings solo vehicle agility bar apply right and so it was all a matter of taking this foundation of the most advanced autopilot code in the world and then kind of like automating it but flying is it the only thing that Silla does automatically it also sets up your shots for you controls the gimbal and smoothly moves the camera to get the shot you want using a mode called cable cam I set a start and end position for the drone in space the drone can then move back and forth along a virtual cable while the gimbal smoothly tilts up without me even having to touch the controller or maybe you'd rather take your next big selfie with a flying machine so let's go here to GPS flight let's hit selfie that looks good press right arrow to start the selfie and do a selfie from right there so this nice pull away tilt down reveal the dramatic selfie so it gets to the end now it's gonna automatically turn right back around I can click this little record button so I can record this right here in the app there it is swooping in on us swooping in not afraid of you we want to be part of what I think is the Golden Age of storytelling and as you know people have insatiable appetite for telling their their own story the only thing you're missing is perspective the oh one thing you can't do is go beyond arm's length while there's a selfie stick so you can go slightly beyond arm's length but basically you know we've been telling our own story within the limits of our reach and you know if Hollywood is telling your story they'd go beyond the limits of your region the idea is is that you know rather than you being behind the camera rather than you being the director maybe you should be the actor and that's really 3d arse bet that they can create the best drone platform not just for drone pilots and filmmakers but for anyone who wants to capture aerial footage of themselves with a GoPro it's easy to imagine taking in solo with me on a hike putting it in the air letting it follow me around and getting some cool footage of me and the most important thing is I can just kind of forget it's up there I can focus on my feet so I wouldn't trip like I did earlier in the day competition in the drone market is getting more intense DJI just announced the phantom three the latest in a line of products that has defined what a drone looks like in the popular imagination how big of a moment is this for 3d are like big you know based on what I've read you guys are sort of like third place in sales right now is there is there a sense of that you're sort of the underdog at this this moment absolutely yeah I mean we're we are a player but we are the underdog player right and you know how big of a defining moment is I mean it is the moment I don't think that many many people in the world know who 3d are is right an order of magnitude less than our bigger competitors out there but I think that's all going to change very soon Oh