8/31/2023 0 Comments Racing drone drlBest For Overall Design: ARRIS X-Speed 280 V2. ![]() Best For All Skill Levels: EMAX Tinyhawk Freestyle BNF.Best For Pocket Drones: ImmersionRC Vortex 150 Mini.Best For Overall Features: Walkera F210 3D.We can assume that no expense will be spared. The DSA is setting up a World Drone Racing Championship in October, to be held at Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii, where Jurassic Park was filmed. The FAA estimates that Americans bought a million drones in the 2015 holiday season alone, with 2016 sales projected at 1.9 million. According to the NPD Group, drone sales over the six months ending in April of this year were four times what they were in the same period a year ago. This year the Drone Nationals attracted some blue-chip sponsors, including AIG and GoPro. The business trends are in their favor, anyway. It’s Running Man–it’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger come to life! It’s The Hunger Games!” (It could be argued that Arnold Schwarzenegger is in fact already alive, and the Hunger Games were actually a dystopian atrocity, but you see what he means.) “It’s a 21st century sport,” Refsland says. Whereas if you put on something like Hololens, now there’s 12 drones racing, and you get all the markers, all the various leaderboards, who’s what, who’s where, who’s in first.” Given that the racers are already essentially flying computers, it should lend itself well to high-tech innovation. “If you looked at a field with the naked eye, you would just basically see four drones. He imagines a future scenario of blended-reality events where audience members can race along with the pros virtually and remotely. “We’re going to be entering into the world of multi-stream, multi-screen, multi-broadcast,” says Scott Refsland, the DSA’s chairman and chief evangelist. ![]() ![]() So far drone racing may be running a year or two ahead of the broadcast and display technology, like VR and augmented reality, it will need to make it must-see entertainment. The bar is high: there’s a high rate of infant mortality among newfangled sports leagues-for every Electronic Sports League (booming) and World Surf League (thriving) there’s a National Xball League (paintball). In a professional race the drones are usually equipped with bright colored LEDs so you can tell them apart, but it’s a major challenge for promoters and broadcasters and everybody else who’s trying to turn drone racing into a major-league business. If drone racing is hard to do, it can also be hard to watch: the drones are small, and they tend to look a lot alike, so it’s not easy follow the action or even tell who’s winning. When you have all that adrenaline coursing through you, it’s hard to control your fingers.” Furadi made the finals this weekend and finished fourth overall. When I’m flying a drone I’ve only got my thumbs. “If I’m racing a motorcycle, I’m nervous, but I’ve got my whole body to control this thing. “In other things where there’s competition involved it’s usually gross motor functions,” says Conrad Miller, a father of four from Boise, Idaho, who flies under the name Furadi. This is called first-person view, or FPV, and it makes you feel like you’re inside the drone, or possibly like you are the drone.įor the racers it is, by all accounts, as much a mind game as anything else: Uou have to have nerves of carbon fiber to keep your fingers steady under racing conditions. You route the video feed from your drone’s forward-facing camera through a pair of VR goggles, which gives you a drone’s-eye-view of the action. The basic idea is, you get a bunch of drone flyers together. “About two years ago you start to see communities forming online-forum posts, how do I build a drone, where can I race it,” Horbaczewski adds. ![]() “About four years ago you started to see stuff out of Australia about it,” says Nick Horbaczewski, CEO of the Drone Racing League, which notably did not run the Drone Nationals this weekend-not only is drone racing now a sport, there are several competing professional circuits. The Drone Nationals which are run by an outfit called the Drone Sports Association, or DSA, are the biggest swing anybody has taken yet to bring the sport to the mainstream.Īs young as it is, the origins of drone racing are still shrouded in mystery. But drone racing already has deep grass roots-there are dozens of local and regional drone races every month.
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