Refreshingly honest about the video quality you should expect in the main promo video. Typical problems like dynamic range, color profile, light bleed and tracking problems with the top of the head being cut off at one point. Pretty typical unless you spend more money on your drone or camera equipment. There are so many companies that fake the footage or pick much easier shooting locations.
I think this is going to be one of those things where we learn that nobody actually cares about any of that outside these forums. MP3s were garbage, early camera phones were garbage, Snap picture quality generally is garbage, bluetooth headphones suck, all of these things were and are decried by the tech community, and it turns out that people just don't care, because even at garbage quality it's still cool to have a robot take your picture.
I do some extreme sports for hobbies, where I am often the only person with the sense of mind to take shots with my trusty olympus TG2 (yes it's old, but still works) of others with me, whether underwater or 6Km above. My professional photographer friend often berates me for my framing, perspective, lighting choices etc, but when I'm hanging almost upside down and only using one hand covered by a mitt, whilst nobody else has the energy to pose or even think of stopping, I think there's only so much you can do.
Anyway, the point is, my friends have lots of pictures of themselves doing these activities, versus non at all.
Brain is an associative data store. You have lot's of stuff stored there, but you can't recall things without suitable key. Even a technically lousy photo can work as the key that bringz back the memories.
Even without the robot angle "cool" aspect of a drone, it's a step along a progression that's shown clear demand: first selfies, then selfie sticks, then no-stick-needed non-selfie selfies.
It seems much more likely that the stick in this picture was used to press the shutter release button of a camera on a tripod than to suspend the camera itself.
Except that mp3s sucked until the iPod, and camera phones sucked until the iPhone. The idea that product quality, ease of use, UX/UI, or polish doesn't matter is just wrong. This thing is absolutely going to bomb (reminds me of GoPro's Karma) and I'd bet money on it, but SNAP stock is already in dire straits, so their incompetence is probably priced in.
Just being able to download music from the internet was already a game changer, it didn't suck! Before that if you wanted to hear a song from an album you didn't have at hand and you wanted it RIGHT NOW, you had to call into a radio station and ask nicely for another human being you've never met to play it for the entire city.
Waiting 60 minutes to download "Stairway to Heaven - LIVE rip" by "Guns N Roses and Bob Marley and U2 and Green Day" was a privilege.
I’m arguing the opposite of what you think I am. MP3s won because you could download and throw a gazillion of them on a portable device, cell phone cameras won because they were always on you. If this thing wins it’ll be because it’s cheap, you can swap the battery fast enough to make up for the shitty battery life, and the ux is simple enough that people who don’t care about drones can get drone shots. I’m completely on your side - the technical specs don’t matter if the UX is right.
I mean who cares about the stock, they have 5B in annual revenue, 58% gross margin, they’re cash flow positive, and spent 1.5B in R&D last year. Snapchat and Discord are the messaging apps.
By basically every measure they’re extremely successful and following the Google strat of their main advertising business finding moonshots.
No, camera phones were very good since the Sony Ericsson days - ~2006.
I have a book from that era all about mobile camera photography, written by a professional photographer, and illustrated only with pictures shot on a Nokia phone. The pictures are of excellent printable quality with amazing colors.
It was extremely popular brand in Europe for many years. At one time almost everybody had a good Nokia or Sony Ericsson. I saw Motorola Razr like one time in the wild.
Well, I speak from an American perspective and the Razr was everywhere, but according to Wikipedia their peak was around 10% market share. Nokia was much much more popular.
IIRC a combination of weird regional roaming agreements, odd incompatible networks and the sheer size of the country leading to lots of coverages blackspots meant that the US just didn't get widespread adoption of decent mobile tech.
Yeah, that makes the iPhone hype much more sensible. I remember it as very much underwhelming, I had a phone like that 2 years before it came out, and it had apps.
My Sony K750i from 5 years earlier was phenomenal. Only 2mp resolution but the lens was brilliant and I've still got a bunch of photos I printed from it that still stand up to scrutiny.
I think at that period the US was way behind the rest of the world on mobile tech. I remember people in a phone shop in New York being really impressed with it.
I was too busy being deafened by Frank Sinatra a split second after the rotor noise played to even remember hearing the rotor noise; rather than faking the silence they just over-wrote my memory of it in the advertisement with shock-and-awe style Sinatra -- I guess that's okay.
I was positively surprised, despite the music. Some time ago I was very annoyed by all these "drone projects" on kickstarter or concept artist sites about drones following you all day as personal assistants, for example. IMHO, drone noise is just as limiting factor as the battery life and products should have it on their promotion materials, even if it is for a split second.
But while you're doing whatever it is that you're capturing, whether or not there is a loud humming noise the entire time can completely change the dynamic, especially if other people are around.
That is nice, but there is still intentionally misleading marketing fluff like this:
>Each rechargeable battery allows you to capture content for 5-8 flights, depending on the flight mode(s) selected. Rechargeable batteries can be swapped for easy use...
Why phrase it like that? That gives zero impression of what the actual battery life is because I have no idea what a "flight" means as a unit of measurement. Just tell us how much time it lasts.
I fly FPV drones, I have one very similar to that size. running a 1s 300mah lihv I get about 3 to 5 minutes. 5 minutes damages the battery. but the tiny lihv never liv long enough anyways.
I'd expect it to get close to that time, but it has so much more plastic around it. but then again it's not transmitting video.
That matches with the estimate in another comment chain[1]. That is low enough that listing it will likely be off-putting to many potential customers. It is why I think it is misleading to try to hide that number with a more opaque metric.
The standard advice is: Buy a transmitter and practise for like 5-10 hours in the simulator before pulling the trigger on a real one. Radiomaster Zorro, Jumper T-Pro, TBS Mambo are some good ones. Go directly for ExpressLRS/TBS Tracer long range protocols so you wont have to worry about your quad falling out of sky because of range issues.
If you want something that is more "ready to fly" (goggles, quadcopter, transmitter combo) You do have more choices these days:
The problem with these ready to fly combos - especially on the low end (analog video) is that, you end up getting very toy like transmitter and goggles, that wont be of much use for you once you want to buy/build more quadcopters. So I highly recommend getting the transmitter and goggles separately.
Thanks! My preference would be to start really cheap just to see if I like the hobby and want to stick with it. I don’t think I’d mind buying a better transmitter later.
They're probably too ashamed of the actual value in minutes...
Reminds me of some internal corporate presentations: when the numbers are good they show percentage increase and when they're bad the show absolute values, and when they're really bad they "forget" to give the time range of that absolute value...
So far as I can tell there are no real spec numbers anywhere. No video size/framerate/resolultion specs I could find (admittedly I only spent 1 or 2 mins clicking around looking for them).
Which kinda indicates the target market they're gonna aim this at. This is for people who want to know "Can I upload the video to Snapchat?" not for people who are wondering "Is this 1080p? Or 720? Surely it can't be 4k?"
I prefer sample videos to specs, because specs are pretty much worthless. The 2021 Macbook Pro has a 1080p camera, but the actual quality is worse than the 720p camera in the 2015 Macbook Pro.
The website has some sample videos, and you can tell the quality is very poor compared to pro drones, but definitely good enough to share with friends and family.
I'm not sure that I follow what you are saying. Are you suggesting the expectation is that each flight yields one photo? It takes milliseconds not minutes to take a photo. I would expect this thing to be taking photos nearly continuously during flight which would make flight time the most informative metric.
Their target market measures the value of this thing in number of Snapchat Stories it can create so really the flights does make more sense. Their target market isn't going to want to divide 3 minutes by 20 seconds.
Each flight is a snapchat story appropriate sub-minute interval, like 15-40 seconds sort of thing. I really don't want to sound condescending, but if that isn't immediately obvious then you aren't the target audience.
I’m not a Snapchat user and I just looked through the videos on my phone and I have tons that are in the 15 to 25s range. In fact I have hardly any that are longer than 30s. Short segments of drone video from a durable device you can throw in a bag seem fun and useful.
Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo? That is rather condescending to their customers. Battery life seems like a basic thing someone might want to know before spending a few hundred bucks on something like this.
>Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo?
I agree that it's condescending, but it's also obvious to me that there is a growing market trend to sell to a class of people that simply buy the Next Big Thing without ever learning about it, using it, or questioning the motivations behind it.
In a way that's a great group to capitalize on, they may lack the education or desire to ask the tough questions, they don't actually use the product so you don't really need to support them well, and they tend to buy oriented strongly with advertisement.
When I see a technical product marketed this way -- bright colors, flashy every-person advertisement, zero-training-required, no real technical specs -- I always imagine that it's in that class of product. Sort of the opposite of 'prosumer' classed product.
A titch bit more useful than a Funko Pop doll until The Next Next Big Thing is released by BigCo , the firmware gets dated, the batteries die and remain unreplacable due to a lack of support for The Old Big Thing, and then BigCo drops software support due to trying to shove people into the new model, and then it becomes under-bed trash with a dangerous LiPo in it.
I don’t fault them for this specifically. IIRC the 30 minute airtime standard is some kind of FAA regulation; it’s not a differentiator one way or another between drone products.
there absolutely are, without a gimbal, by using a somewhat large sensor and movement/orientation/inertia sensor ICs to perform a software crop and stabilization as the video is recorded.
such as the hypersmooth 2.0 or hypersmooth 3.0 on a gopro hero9 black/hero10 etc. but those are considerably more expensive cameras.
search youtube for gopro hypersmooth 3.0 and you'll see some examples of the same gopro with and without hypersmooth turned on.
I mean yeah, it's about half the price of a DJI Mini 2 ($449 v $230). You'd expect it to perform worse. It seems totally reasonable for people who just want to take some shots for their snapchat story but aren't really interested in having a real drone.
The Mini SE is readily available for $299 and I don't think even the Snap demographic is going to find that a camera with no gimbal is acceptable for the application.
I'm not predicting whether it will sell or not, I'm bad at that, but it's just not a lot of drone for the price.
is it 4 motors? especially with data about current RPMs of the motors, with a FFT and some adjustments, it should be pretty trivial to deafen the sound.
From my listening many motors are effectively pretty simple instruments with normal harmonics etc which are easy to model. I could be wrong though.
There's so much white noise outdoors that removing the dominant harmonics that make drones, well, drone,† would make a huge difference in the palatability of being around them.
†The noise quadcopters make has nothing to do with why they're called drones, but is the perfect description nonetheless for the noise they emit
The video that they try to show as if out of the drone is heavily edited to make it look similar to the other camera that they have used. It is very likely that they used non-stock camera software in the drone to capture raw and post-process for this ad, which will most likely not be available to the public.
iPhone 12 mini weighs 135g, over half the 250g limit for mini-drones. It seems unfeasible for a pocket-size drone in the near future, unless the drone could pull power from the iPhone and not need its own battery.
Mavic Mini has a payload capacity around 180g, but it also has a nice camera already.
Drones need power FAST for short bursts (aka one flight). I don’t know if the iPhone battery supports that usage. It would be cool though if the phone could be a truly universal tool like that.
I'd be pretty worried about an accident that damages my phone; I don't think I'd want something like that. But I wouldn't be surprised if some people do.
The pocket drone needs a way to know where you are in order to direct the camera at you and come back at the end. Right now they do so by pairing the drone with your phone (I guess using Bluetooth).
Tracking via Bluetooth would be much less trivial than "Ok, I'll fly toward that smiling face until I see a hand in bottom camera, then I'll just start descending until it looks close enough to shut down my motors".
Not that I think it should be done, but since the drone is carrying the phone, you could have the phone save a GPS point of where you are standing, and then the phone guides the drone away from that point to photograph toward it.
Depending on GPS accuracy in the phone it could work well. GPS waypoint missions are already well established in the drone world.
an actual FPV flight hobbyist 5" prop size class quadcopter (such as you might fly with goggles and a real remote control) can typically carry a gopro hero8/9/10 but a gopro is also a lot more compact, brick shaped, rugged, and has very extensively researched video stabilization systems in gopro's proprietary "hypersmooth" which writes the stabilized video into the HEVC file it records.
putting something flat and large like an iphone on a 5" FPV quadcopter would be awkward and bad.
I think this is such a fun/playful idea, kudos to Snap!
Their first hardware product pretty much bombed but this is oddly one of the first consumer tech toys in a while that I've felt I wanted. I can definitely see this being a fun thing to bring out in the backyard or to cookouts/parties, especially as a dad with young kids too.
A couple things I'd be a bit worried about:
* Battery life would need to last long enough to use this on and off for a few hours. If it's like 15 mins then no way.
* Would there be an audible hum in the video it records from the 4x propellers?
The Pixy is good for "5-8 flights using the default flight modes" and the default flight duration seems to be 30 seconds. Therefore, the battery will likely last you at most 4 minutes.
> Would there be an audible hum in the video it records from the 4x propellers?
And for those who are at the beach just trying to enjoy a little time away from the city. The folks at the beach near me are already fed up with ubiquitous Bluetooth speakers.
I live on a beach in Thailand on a small tropical island and it is absolutely frown upon if someone fly with drones. It is not just the beach where I live but on all beaches island-wide where there is a high chance for that you will be asked to put your drone away. Nobody wants a camera to record their beach trip.
Maybe snaps drone is more acceptable as it seem to primarily trying to be a flying selfie stick that records you and not the entire beach area, but it still emit a buzzing that will annoy everybody.
Imagine if this product category takes off and having 10 or 20 of these on a beach becomes norm. Well, there goes your nice holiday. Enjoy your trip.
I am so tempted to start a hardware company that makes auto aiming bbguns, slingshots and one more thing... predator drones (in-app purchase doom metal and eagle noises).
I think if people are allowed their buzzing flying camera doodads everywhere my nose diving metal eagle raining sudden drone death from above is in good fun. Now I am the law.
Besides the killer bird will obviously be powered by an AI, can't blame me for nothing.
And what if we could mount these directional speakers directly on someone’s head! Then we could reduce the volume a lot so it’s even quieter to neighbors. Maybe use some sort of physical bell or cup shape to direct it right into someone’s ears without ultrasonics (for cost reasons). Then we might save enough that we can use 2x speakers to get L/R audio streams.
To address your point rather than your sarcasm: headphones are unsafe while cycling because they block environmental sounds (though it’s true that music from a speaker can impact attentional blindness. There is also the shared experience of listening to music with another person. The ability to create a “music bubble” around you without disturbing others satisfies both parties.
Ultrasonic speakers aren’t even exotic tech. I first encountered one in a museum at least ten or fifteen years ago.
(Am fairly certain they aren't great if you are going for audiophile level reproduction - but from a safety perspective, they let you hear your environment - note, I have personally never tried them)
Quality isn't amazing, but it's acceptable and it isn't like you'd be enjoying a high quality audio experience with wind rushing past your ears using normal headphones, anyway.
Also beats getting hit by a car that you didn't hear.
I'm a runner not a cyclist, but I use AfterShokz headphones. The sound quality is suprisingly good, more than adequate for listening to music and podcasts when out :)
For personal safety though, they win hands down. I can hear cars and people easily and I'm much more aware of surroundings. Downside is though that if you are running down a busy road, the sound of cars can override the sound of your audio but for me, that's an acceptable trade off.
I have aftershokz aeropex. If you are hoping for studio monitors you're going to be disappointed. If you just want to listen to podcasts or "workout music" then I think they are great. I use mine way more often around the house than I expected that I would.
They are a problem. Just one we’ve all learned to tolerate. Do you know how much nicer a beach without car noise is compared with one off a highway? Do we want to just have to accept that our public spaces are full of car noise and drone noise in 10 years - or do we want to hold the line and maybe try to re-route cars wherever possible?
> Destruction of light/sound pollution sources in places otherwise free of such pollution is totally morally justified IMO.
What do you mean by "destruction"? If you mean actually breaking someone's speaker, then you're wrong and fundamentally don't understand externalities.
If you read the original Pigouvian and Coasian theory behind externalities, you'll realize that inherent to the nature of an externality is each side, by getting their way, is externalizing on the other. If you mandate silence, you're forcing that silence on others just as much as them playing music is forcing that sound on you. It's morally equivalent. You just have a belief that the absence of sound is the preferred state but that's not inherent. If birds are making tons of concurrent bird songs, that might sound like a cacophony to you, but you have no right to just go and destroy the birds.
You are right and where I sympathize with you is that those with speakers basically thrust their noise on others with no system to push back and find a socially optimal equilibrium. And that is unfair.
But what we could/should do is either:
(A) create beach decibel maximums such that a person's music cannot be heard beyond X feet from them. That way they would have to find a place where they aren't externalizing on others. I always try to do this when I go to the beach anyway.
(B) create beach areas where noise is allowed and areas where it isn't. But this shouldn't be limited to just music. Boisterous people can disrupt a serene beach environment too.
Both of these solutions attempt to create win-win solutions with some compromise, which is the whole point of how an externality is internalized. Just blanket letting one side win or the other side win is not solving the problem.
I don't see how there are 'sides' to this. Blasting a BT speaker with your music, which the majority of people aren't likely to enjoy because of the huge variety of peoples taste in music, is a uniquely selfish thing to do.
I don't know about you, but blasting my Spotify likes on a BT speaker in a crowded, and particularly an enclosed environment, would not be an enjoyable experience. I can imagine it's only enjoyable if one is sufficiently self absorbed enough to think that their music is universally enjoyed by everyone.
Go to any nature area with hiking trails near decent population centers and you're likely to encounter this. If you want to "enjoy" music while in nature, wear headphones... I'd rather hear birds, the wind hitting leaves, approaching wildlife, etc. I don't want to hear your shitty music from 40 feet away.
Yeah, because you defined a line where the vast majority of people would agree.
But you can slide the line over to a point where people would be more split on the issue. E.g. say you're alone on a public beach playing your music, and one other person walks up to also enjoy the beach and who doesn't want to hear your music. Should you turn off the music? Is there a db level that's acceptable? Should the other person be required to find a quieter spot further down the coast? Or should you have to relocate to an empty spot?
What about when it is a small group playing very low music such that it is quickly drowned out by the sound of the waves and the birds after 10 feet of distance. Headphones are actually impede their enjoyment of the situation there because
(a) they cannot easily talk to one another with headphones in
(b) they cannot enjoy the mixing sounds of nature and music. In many cases, folk music or classical music at low volume mixed with nature can be very enjoyable for people.
The problem here is you see no value to their enjoyment of these things and thus weight their enjoyment of such experience at zero while their interruption of your situation as an invasion. But if you force them to stop listening to music, you too are disrupting or invading their lives. That's the two-sided nature of any negative externality and attempts to internalize it. We all need to view this from the perspective of social costs and social benefits (i.e. a utilitarian perspective across all people's happiness). The result is almost always a compromise between the two extremes.
Correct. I also see no value to someone’s enjoyment of punching others in the face. I am perfectly fine disrupting and invading their lives to force them to stop punching others in the face.
I was drafting an extensive response to this, but I am on a time crunch with my work schedule. If you are honestly interested in understand optimal solutions to externalities and handling the problem of social costs, I would recommend checking out Ronald Coase's paper "The Problem of Social Cost" for which he won the Nobel prize.[1]
I will hopefully have time this weekend to draft my response.
The TLDR is that, their "right to noise" impedes upon your "right to silence" but also your "right to silence" impedes upon their "right to noise". Giving either side the complete right and banning the other side is effectively having one force its way upon the other. Forcing silence is by definition an externality as well -- it just happens to be the side you value. But there are better middle ground solutions where we balance the benefits of each side.
A very clean example of this is noise pollution next to an airport. If the houses next to the airport had a complete right to silence then we couldn't have airplanes. But if the airplanes had a complete right to noise, then quality of life around the airport would diminish way too much. Instead, the socially optimal solution lies in the middle. It is why zero pollution is actually NOT socially optimal as the costs of zero pollution are too high.
For each additional decibel produced, the marginal social costs increase at a faster rate. Thus, people whispering at the beach or playing very low music such that it is quickly drowned out by the sound of the waves and the birds after 5 feet of distance is fine.
A blanket ban on all music on the beach doesn't actually enable us to find the socially optimal levels in the same way as a blanket allowance of music on the beach. In the airport example, a blanket ban or allowance would prevent innovations in things like sound protective walls to internalize some (though never all) of the externality.
Without necessarily supporting it, there's a property-based take as well, in which you have complete rights over the air, water, light, noise, etc. within your private property boundaries. As a society, we've largely agreed that there are too many logistical challenges and societal benefits to take a hardline stance here, but you _could_ make a case that any unwanted pollution into your property (without agreed upon compensation, which do exist today in the form of easements) would be equivalent to trespassing.
1. Silence is the default mode, Bluetooth speakers require a much more active effort so that's not really a fair comparison.
2. Birds like any animal or creature acts on instinct; there's not an active decision on their part to disrupt the environment with sound, again not a fair comparison.
3. The idea of requiring a maximum dB doesn't really work in the sound doesn't just instantly drop off like that so the physics aren't really going to work out.
> 1. Silence is the default mode, Bluetooth speakers require a much more active effort so that's not really a fair comparison.
That is a logical fallacy called "Default Bias." There is nothing inherent about something being the default that makes it better. We should never have created writing, architecture, or anything new because the status quo was better? The status quo can be objectively bad and sometimes the active effort to change it is warranted. Systemic racism is the default. Lack of access to clean water was the default. Woman as stay-at-home moms and excluded from the workforce was the default. Additionally, "much more active effort" is a nonsense statement. Everyone is engaging in effort to get value/happiness. It is not for you to judge how much effort I am willing to exert for my own happiness. It took a lot of effort for women to not be silences in the political system through the suffragette movement. Many people just over 100 years ago in the US were saying that the default role for women was silence. (Clarification, I am not saying that there is not a value to silence or that people playing music is not a harm -- there is a value to silence and people blasting music is a harm -- but it is not simply as black and white as you want to make it out to be on the social cost-benefit)
> 3. The idea of requiring a maximum dB doesn't really work in the sound doesn't just instantly drop off like that so the physics aren't really going to work out.
If there is other natural sounds that drown out the artificial sound, then the maximum dB rule is pretty effective. A beach with active waves and lots of birds is a great example of this. My level of noise is very relative to the ambient background noise.
> If you mandate silence, you're forcing that silence on others just as much as them playing music is forcing that sound on you.
Except that personal audio sources are much more feasible than personal noise suppression, especially if you also want to be able to carry a conversation.
That is very true and a reason why an individual listening to music alone should bias towards a personal audio source to internal his sound externality. That is because there is virtually no additional benefit to the individual to play music loudly than to play it in headphones when it is just for his benefit.
But you are ignoring that a substantial percentage (if not majority) of music enjoyment situations are simultaneously social situations. Personal audio sources are objectively sub-optimal in that situation. Thus, there is a cost to those enjoying the music of using a personal audio source. Silent discos result in a total inability to talk to one another. If you are playing ambient music as you have conversations, then a personal audio source simply doesn't work.
> Silent discos result in a total inability to talk to one another.
This largely depends on the headphones used. I can listen to ambient music on my bone conduction headphones while holding a conversation just fine. I might have to lower the volume to hear people around me well, but at least I can lower the volume.
I’m surprised that after all this time there isn’t really a standard for synchronizing music playback between a large number of nearby smartphones.
This is a great response, you did a good job elucidating the deeper moral and interpersonal issue while also connecting with and understanding the reason the OP is upset and even suggesting real policy changes. Thanks!
I understand coaseian externality calculations very well; the optimal externality allocation is so far biased in one direction that my statement about destroying bluetooth speakers is an extremely accurate and low-computational-cost estimate of the actual optimum.
You've gotten a lot of speculation in the answers from people who obviously haven't looked at the specs. The simple answer is there not going to be an audible hum in the video because there is no microphone ;)
I'd be surprised if they get 15 minutes, I've played with the DJI mini and barely get that (per battery), and this one looks bulkier and with worse aerodynamics. That said, you probably don't want a noisy drone just hovering next/over your party all the time, and they do include a couple of batteries, swap is super easy.
It's really dependent on what both of you are doing with the drones. If you are boosting around fast and high, it's going to be less. If you are just hovering around the house then it's going to be longer.
Battery health and actual charge capacity could be different too, depending on how the batteries are stored and how they have been treated etc.
Gotcha, I have no experience with drones so that's a bit of a bummer but you're right—this would not be hovering continuously so if the "total play time" could be over an hour with a fast battery switch that could be enough.
Yeah, I was thinking something like this would be useful for filming myself surfing (to get a better idea of all the things I'm doing wrong), but I have no drone experience either and didn't realize that such short flight times are the norm. Sounds like that kind of use case won't be realistic for quite some time.
Can the mini follow me around and just take the video I’d want to capture the moment? The pixy seems very easy to operate. I don’t want to have to be thinking about controlling the thing.
It does have a follow feature, but honestly I've never tried it. It's pretty easy to pilot, fwiw, and like most DJI drones has an incredible price to quality and features ratio. I'd be surprised if this drone comes anywhere near in range/image quality/features/etc. The form factor reminds me of the tiny-whoop class of FPV drones, which are super fun but not great outdoors as they will easily be blown away by even light wind. But I can see this having a certain appeal, as a drone version of a polaroid camera. It's also very cute!
With its follow feature, can I just turn it on and have it go? I want something where I don’t stop the moment and most certainly do not have to have a controller or really anything external.
I have to agree that this seems like a lot of fun. A lot of people in this thread are focusing on quality and comparing to other, more capable and more expensive drones. However, something small and relatively cheap that you can carry on a strap around your neck seems like a unique value prop. So long as it passes the bar of reasonable durability and quality I could see a lot of people wanting one.
100% yes and this is why every drone video ever has music over it.
That and even without the buzz anything most drones picked up would not be meaningful sound. Most are too far away and moving too much to pick up voices, better to just record off your phone to get conversation and/or ambient noise.
I'm almost surprised they even put a mic on this thing, though I'm sure from a product marketing perspective people would ding them for not having one.
AI is not even required, it would be quite easy to filter out the frequency of the noise from the rotors using technology that has existed for decades if not almost 100 years, indeed Butterworth was designing his filters in the 1930’s
Simple FIR filter won't do the job, noise from the rotors and moving air is wideband and overlaps with signal.
But adaptive filters used in noise-cancelling headphones with separate mics may work. One directional microphone records sound from the scene, the other undirected one records sound of the drone, then filter tries to minimize drone sound component in the signal from the mic by adjusting coefficients of the filter.
If I were a drone manufacturer of this type of camera drone, I would release free/downloadable audio profiles/captures of my drone operating at different speeds, to allow filtering to remove them based on the flight profile... (Maybe keep a log of propeller speeds, sync'd to the video)
No quad-rotor drone battery this size can last for hours; it's just not possible with the specific energy available in batteries. If the entire drone were a battery (i.e. the rotors and housing were mass-less), it could last 45 mins. I expect battery life to be around 20 mins.
I believe each default flight time would be measured in seconds, so it's understandable that they are recommending their "Dual Battery Charger" (Two Pixy rechargeable batteries with USB-C charging station).
The device itself does not have a microphone. I imagine that you would use your phone's microphone if you wanted audio. Most drone-chasing shots use this method, a microphone on the subject is much better at capturing the sounds you actually want to hear.
People saying that this can’t compete with DJI are missing the point.
This product knows its target market (hint, not the people who browse HN) and, based on my initial first impressions, I think it’s nailed it.
Forgive me for a slightly contrived analogy, but if a
DJI Mavic is a DSLR, and a DJI Mini is a portable point-and-shoot camera, then Pixy is a Polaroid. It’s certainly not got the highest picture quality, doesn’t have good altitude or range and the 30s flight time sounds laughable, but it’s a nice looking, approachable device that looks like it could be used by anyone to take videos they currently can’t with the devices they currently have (the mode dial is a brilliant idea.)
I think this thing will sell very nicely. The big question for me is whether the Pixy wireless streaming to the phone allows exports out of the Snapchat app, if it does then all the biggest TikTok stars will buy one immediately and it will explode in popularity.
Completely agree with you. Not only that, but Snap (it seems) have done a great job in limiting the features so it only focuses on their core users use case.
They didn't go for a skydio "follow me when I go for a run" they don't have a flight path. Though you likely could get the drone into trouble if you tried, a 30 second clip is enough for it to start flying, you move a few feet away, it follows you with a very close range, and then it is ready to land again.
A great example of constraints making a better/simpler product.
Why would people who browse HN be left out of the target market? I think I can speak for many that we'd be interested in this product if it could compete with some of DJI's offerings.
Lacking that + any sort of open-source software that we can go in and tinker with, and it's a hard sell to anybody, not just HN readers.
Turn the Pixy’s dial to one of its four flying modes..
Hover: Here, the Pixy reverses a couple of feet and floats in front of you like a hummingbird. In the Snapchat app, you can customize, up to 60 seconds, how long you’d like it to capture video
Reveal: Like a traditional drone shot, the Pixy reverses and flies upward to reveal your scene. My favorite of the bunch, it won’t fly more than 30 feet away from you (you can shorten that distance in the app) and it only goes about 15 feet up in the air.
Follow: The Pixy will follow you around very, very slowly.
Orbit: The Pixy will reverse to 5, 8 or 15 feet (whichever you set in the app) then make a full circle around you before flying back.
There are two cameras on the Pixy: One points down, stabilizing the drone and detecting your hand, aka its landing pad. The other faces outward, tracking you and capturing video and photos. Flight patterns are preprogrammed so it doesn’t rely on any additional sensors for navigation or collision avoidance.
It doesn't help that WSJ's video player quality looks like absolute butt, at least on mobile. The compression is horrific, with no way to change the bitrate or resolution. Why do most 3rd-party video players suck so much?
Thank you for this! Based on their quick video, I wasn’t quite sure of the control scheme. Four basic modes with a little bit of extra control seems ideal for this kind of product.
Super cool little fun product. I like that Snap tries to be different and take chances on hardware.
Their glasses never really took off but they still iterated on it and did a second version and I’m sure some of the lessons learned there were applied to this product.
> influencer videos are filmed by someone else. What if you didn’t need someone else?
This is a solved problem though.. in much higher spec (and not that much more expensive).
Suppose you're an influencer I guess you can shell out a few hundred more for a proper drone.
> Most drones are aimed at people who want to fly something
Also if you're talking about the largest drone maker on the market (DJI, >50% market share). This is not true, they are literally flying cameras, the whole point of those drones are to take pictures and videos.
They don't stick a 4K resolution camera, 3D gimbal stabilization on a 250g drone because customer wanted to 'fly something'. They do it because it is used to make footage (I own one).
> I guess you can shell out a few hundred more for a proper drone.
But who flies it?
> They do it because it is used to make footage (I own one).
But doesn’t that involve you flying the drone to make footage by looking at something else?
What’s interesting about this Snap drone is that it’s pitched as something that will just stare at you so you can make fancy selfies. I could be missing it, but I don’t think this is how most drones market themselves.
I remember Snap was one of the very first meme stock. They failed with their camera spectacles. They failed to keep up with computer vision compared to TikTok and shift towards Gen Z. They failed to come up with a decent creators monetization system.
Recently I read that they are signing MOUs with entertainment companies that involved AR tech. And now they are involved in making drones. Drone is a super hard market to enter even with some industry experience, case in point Gopro.
Snap really shows how much the entire social media as an industry is struggling. Snap's future is bleak, it would be interesting to see how long they last.
I mean this in the kindest way possible: I suspect you're out of touch.
Snapchat is used by more than 90% of 13-24 year olds in the USA and Gen-Z increasingly prefers it to any other form of communications social media. The ephemeral, personal nature of snap has been enormously popular with the youngest generation, and there's no sign of it stopping. Latest Q1 reports show daily users up 18% annually, 2 million more than forecast.
Are they looking for more money? Yes, as is their fiduciary responsibility as a publicly traded company... but that doesn't mean they're flagging.
They're down 45% in the last 6 months. 53% the last 12. They're flagging. None of their cutesy hardware has taken off in the past (remember spectacles?).
I think it's worth noting that their stock is still up 185% since March of 2020. In spite of the prior failures at hardware, the app is still incredibly popular among young people.
ARKK, the top performing ETF of 2021, is down 60% over the last year. Tech, in general, has declined substantially, mostly due to interest rates rising.
Huh? Snap has really buckled down and gone from a forgone conclusion to having record quarters of revenue growth and monetization. They have repeatedly focused on digging in and trying new things.
Spectacles wasn't a ground-breaking idea, but it was a GREAT innovative shot which was hard to copy by FB at the time. Similarly this is another great innovation hard to have others copy. Is it niche? Yeah probably, but it shows they are looking at ALL the interesting areas.
For what it's worth, Snap has been ahead of the game on AR filters and AR tech for a while. Releasing this doesn't imply they aren't also doing work there.
Yeah, many would think so, me included, but I also recognize strange as it is, there is a whole younger generation that it has been the defacto communications app for like 4-5 years now, so that's something to ride.
The camera quality doesn't look great, even in the promo videos. You'd think a software company can put on some some decent color balance at least. Also the video is very wobbly because it's such a small platform and no gimbal. That can be fixed in large part in software too.
I suppose they're going for the artistically constrained angle, more like a disposable camera.
I feel like this is the worst part about Snapchat. Everything you record in SC looks like shit. It’s so bad that I feel like it makes Snapchat feel cheaper on the social media hierarchy
Weirdly enough, I like that vibe about snapchat. They are the "cheaper" social media. Nothing is meant to last, and everything is meant to be low key, low stakes, "fun". You're not there to read articles or argue with people, just check out some random memes, dogs, attractive people, whatever and move on with you day. /2c
Yet for some reason it's still worse quality than an iPhone. I switched from an S21 Ultra to a 13 Pro Max and snapchat has noticeably better quality on the iPhone. I just wish they would allow you to use the ultra wide and telephoto sensors as well.
Also it's really bugging me that multiple heads are getting cropped out of frame, in the promo. I would have assumed the immediate first feature would be a bit of ML to find the human and put them in frame, and I assume that's how it accomplishes the orbit and follow-cam shots, so why the awkward clipping?
This little drone has approximately 0 chance of competing with the big players on video quality. Why not simply embrace its limitations, and make them a part of its character?
What AI wrote this!? I'm so confused who is supposed to do what with this.
Edit: I fully understand the product, I'm talking about the marketing material. Is it for children? Take for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfS0P-40_Bo ; that highlights the meaning and capability of the product. Pixy feels Sesame Street.
I for one think a flying, easy to use, autopilot camera is a pretty fun thing to have when going out hiking or to the beach with friends, for example. Just pack one in your bag and set it free pretty much whenever you want. It's basically a camera that flies around you and directs itself. Do you also not see "who is supposed to do what" with a regular camera? Why is this any different?
The one thing that drives me up the wall is being on a beach, or on a hike, and somebody brings out a drone. The whine of the rotors carries much farther than people would like to admit. The ambient screech makes a beautiful natural landscape feel like an anxious techno nightmare.
Now make them cheap, connect it to social media, and target them at teens.
Let's hope these don't take off (pun intended). At least they can only run for a few minutes per battery charge.
drones make unwanted noise and ruin the atmosphere of natural settings. does the world need your boring selfies from an aerial perspective? No. absolutely not.
Only worse than these snapchat plastic teeny drones would a V2 with built-in flood light, for added light-pollution. Let's spoil star-gazing, too! I feel the sudden urge to pick up a book about falconry...
N=1. There are signs everywhere at the Grand Canyon, but the guy flying his drone over literally hundreds of people at sunset a mere 50 meters from a visitors' center and rangers told me, "Oh, sorry, bro. I didn't know."
People also want to run noisy, polluting dirt bikes and side-by-sides on every trail, everywhere.
And people just like you say, "deal with it." And behold, we deal with it by setting access rules. Some wild areas have trails for motorized play, some prohibit it.
Welcome to living in a society. We deal with things by taking everyone's needs into account and finding an appropriate balance.
Eh, if only people were never bad actors and only used drones for that.
I was at a soap box derby a couple weeks back and they had to pause the entire event for fifteen minutes because someone was flying a drone down by the course area.
A couple hundred people were waiting on one person to remove their drone. Even after the announcers were asking the person to remove the drone they continued to keep it there.
> A candy maker had had the same property for over 60 years when a doctor moved next door. After eight years passed without incident between them, the the doctor built a consulting room right against the confectioner’s kitchen. The doctor then found that the noise from the confectioner’s equipment interfered with the doctor’s ability to work, and in particular to hear with a stethoscope. The doctor filed suit to force the confectioner to stop using his equipment. The court recognized that the confectioner might suffer some hardship – thus admitting to the reciprocal nature of harm that Coase would later recognize – but it argued that to avoid even greater (unspecified) individual hardship and inhibiting land development for residential use, the confectioner must stop (9.)
> Coase proposed considering how the parties might settle the dispute in a market transaction once the court made its findings; for space reasons I will present a simplified version of Coase’s argument. Though the doctor had won, in a market settlement he would be willing to allow the machinery to continue to operate were the confectioner to pay the doctor a sum that was greater than the doctor’s loss of income from having to either move or install sound abatement material. Conversely, had the confectioner won, in a market settlement he would have been willing to accept payment from the doctor to stop using the noisy machinery if the amount were greater than the confectioner’s costs to move the equipment or install sound abatement material.
The machinery in that case was shut down because it wasn't desirable in a residential area!
The confectioner was operating out of a house and the doctor wanted to practice out of a shed in his backyard.
So it would be entirely keeping with that outcome to declare that a park or whatever is intended for peaceful relaxation and ban noisy drones.
Of course you'd have to do it with a straight face knowing that the park already has young people in poorly muffled trucks zooming around all the time.
I don't know. The candy maker has been there 60 years and it didn't bother anyone. Does the doctor's right to operate sensitive equipment outweigh the right the candy maker has to use his machines like he's been doing for 60 years? It's not obviously clear to me one way or the other
It's a thought experiment. Don't worry about the specifics. It's that most people normally have a visceral reaction one way or another. But in many cases there could be a voluntary solution where all parties are better off.
For instance, consider a noisy neighbor is throwing a party. Suppose I complain but he really values the party and offers me $100 to let him keep the party going another hour. He obviously values it more than $100 so he's better off as am I. Similarly I could pay him to shut off the party, in which case we're also both better off.
I didn't mean it literally like the drone payers should pay to use their drones in the park, although that's not a bad idea. The park goers could enjoy better service and accept some noise, making everyone better off.
I just thought it was funny seeing someone argue about this and it reminded me of Coase and his work
Source? I think the want to take a cool shot from a drone could actually make alot more teens go outdoors. I don't like drones either but incentivizing going outside through social media is an interesting concept and certainly beats them staying indoors.
Why do you want them to go outdoors, though? You could get more teens to go to the library by turning off all the lights and playing dance music at high volume, but it wouldn't serve the reasons that made you want them to go there in the first place. Instead of spreading the benefit of the library to more people, it would destroy the benefit of the library for everybody (and it would probably make a pretty poor nightclub, too.)
If you want kids to get a little bit of exercise and breath clean air, clean up urban air quality and create walkable cities with park space. Then people who want a busy social outdoor space and don't mind a lot of mechanical noise will have a place to go where their enjoyment won't interfere with the enjoyment of people who want to hear birds and insects and trees moving in the wind.
That's not society's problem. I'm not trying to come up with ways to incentivize Lil' Jimmathy to see the great outdoors at any cost. People can go outside and respect others' desire to enjoy peaceful, beautiful nature, or they can stay inside and scroll on their phones.
Interesting, I actually perceive it to very much be society's problem, and do consider it my responsibility to promote mental and physical health in my community. I found this post [0] useful in considering the difference between entitlement and responsibility.
You should hear canadian geese in nature, I'd take a drone over those any days. I was just in nature near Yosemite listening to those things squeek for hours while also crapping on everything. Nature isn't always silent...
As someone else mentioned, the intended videos are 30 seconds, which I think is reasonable. The battery last 5-8 recordings, so at most 4 minutes. It's really not a big deal IMO
Yea I mean all crowded public places suck if you’re trying enjoy the scenery and relax… I don’t think this product would make it any worse. There’s already plenty of ways to make a lot of noise and annoy folks.
100% agree with you. I own the drone, flew it like 10 times. The main reason, when I bring it with me on road trips - if I see people around, I don't feel comfortable spinning the motors. But those 10 times are mostly when there is nobody around in the BLM lands, I want to take a nice video of beautiful landscape for myself.
i feel this after spending a weekend at the board walk in jersey. influencers all over the damn place..super soaker? nerf gun? target practice at the beach!
Totally unrelated but I feel like everyone smokes weed on the beach now. I’m not a prude, I don’t care, I just don’t want to smell it and have my kids ask about it all the time.
I'd much rather that people smoke weed on the beach than the typical behavior I see from groups of drunk people wandering from bar/club to another bar/club in the "entertainment district" in the evenings in any major city.
What does this have to do with my comment? Or are you saying it should be a gift to go “some people smoke but you shouldn’t smoke because it’s breaking the rules and yes they are breaking the rules and no I can’t make them stop” is really fun. A blast.
I think this may be the first casual consumer drone on the market compatible with the FAA's Operations Over People guidelines released last year: https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/operations_over.... Before this, all flight over people required a waiver by the FAA.
Drones under 250g, like the DJI Mini 2 would qualify as a Category 1 craft, allowing non-sustained flight over people and vehicles, but there was an element that the craft not have exposed blades capable of lacerating human skin, which the DJI Mini 2 fails.
I looked through (edit, most) their site, and can't find any... specs? Nothing about the length of each flight (but it proudly says it can do 5-8 flights). Nothing about the video encoding, or photo-quality, how many people it can track or how it handles crowds. Even the basics like, what phone's does this support, BLE-5 ect?
With no information elsewhere and not actually being able to puchase the device, is this acutally "launched" or just announced?
I think this is a drone targeted at people who don't want a drone though. If you did want a drone, you wouldn't get this, you can't even fly it around. But if you want drone snaps, this is probably way better than dicking around with a mavic. Click the button, drone snap incoming, and you didn't do squat. No flying, no SD cards or file handling. Drone shot triggered straight from the app, and sent straight back into it.
Pretty interesting point, didn’t think of that. The casualty of it.
It is rather intimidating to see someone piloting with a large controller, as opposed to just whipping out their phone like any other time. Definitely makes for a more low-risk social interaction.
I think it's interesting how much the FAA's 250 gram rule has impacted drone manufacturing. Even if it was technically possible I couldn't imagine a company like SNAP launching a drone like this in the previous regulatory grey area of drones.
The EASA also makes a distinction between <250g drones >250g drones, in terms of registration and permissions required.
However drones remain pretty hard to use across the EU, they're strictly forbidden in most places (cities, natural parks) and for the rest you need explicit permission from the county's aviation authority ( and sometimes even more, e.g. in Portugal if the coastline is visible you also need the Coast Guard's permission). Apparently lots of tourists are unaware and are getting fined for that, there was even a few cases recently where oblivious tourists crashed their drones in historical buildings.
If you do anything with this drone that is commercial or non-private in nature, you still need a Part 107 certificate from the FAA to fly it. I expect that would include many influencers who wouldn't otherwise be flying drones at all.
I'm not sure where you got the "non-private" in nature piece. I took this "identification tool" on the FAA website, https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/user_identification_... , and while yes, if you are, say, taking drone photos to hawk some particular product online, that would clearly fall under Part 107.
But an influencer that's just taking vacation photos, even if it's of their impossibly fashionable vacation and it seems obvious that there is an ulterior motive of building their "brand", seems like they could easily argue they're just doing it for recreation and would thus fall under the Recreational Exemption.
That's certainly a fair interpretation of the regulation - but if one could argue that social media is one's 'job', I would also consider posts on their usual accounts as commercial content. I guess the point is the FAA has the discretion to consider your use how they want, and there isn't much good case law / precedent for this because the FAA largely hasn't been enforcing Part 107 requirements yet.
If you do anything with this drone at all, you'll be flat out violating FAA regulations regardless. It seems to be mostly autonomous, and based on marketing and support docs, doesn't appear to have a way to comply with regulations requiring the Pilot-in-Command to always have the ability to make flightpath changes. Gesturing at it or clicking a button on a phone to 'return to home' is not enough.
Pixy weighs just 101 grams. They could have easily gone for a more practical battery life (it seems it's around 5 minutes currently?!), but for some reason chose not to.
cue my dystopian paranoia self: in a few short years technology like this will enable the effortless creation of a perfect, stylish, witty video of each and every day of your life, shot and edited in complete autonomy.
Which shows you at your best.
And expresses none of your fears, anxieties, inelegancies, loneliness, family trauma, time wasting or thoughtless cruelty.
Fast forward another nanosecond in the singularity. Devices like this camera will connect to the internet & ingest your personal timeline. They will respond by themselves to your friends' posts, mimicking their trends, one-upping their flexes, out-cooling them in a constantly accelerating arms race.
Our role in this algorithmic glammering will shrink to nothing as deepfakes expand in scope and become so much interesting than reality.
in the end our bodies will become irrelevant, as we watch our "selves" and our "friends" enact reality in a second, much better, universe.
if people care more about the imagined world than the real world to the degree described in the comment i replied to, then there is no need for our real bodies to actually do anything other than exist. We only need imagine what we'd like to identify with, and the system will handle the rest. We could each be the supreme leader of our own world as far as we can observe
A bunch of bodies existing in reality with minimal real-world activity would be a form of peace.
Real world activity would be a disruption to that peace, and also unobservable to the imagined world since all content is mediated. So anytime a persons behavior does not fit into the imagined world system, they could be killed and no one would care or even know. Maybe everybody is just told that person had a heart attack or whatever.
it's akin to the dangers of not having a free press but with all of those dangers hyper-industrialized
All in all, it's a $250 toy that can hold 5-8 minutes of battery and has a terrible camera on top of the unavoidable hum from the rotors. I'd say it's a fun little gadget, but I can't see this gaining much traction.
My thoughts exactly. It's a cool first-gen product with typical first-gen issues. Hopefully the next version has a better camera, stabilized footage, and software to remove the hum. Then it would be very compelling.
Just what the world needed. Another annoying device out in the sky to fly over your fence, in your yard, in the park, cinemas, public places, restaurants, concerts, at the beach or...in your face.
We must be living in different worlds. The number of times I've been annoyed by a drone is.. 0. The rare times I even do see someone fly a drone I think, "Oh cool, someone having fun fly a drone".
I think learning to enjoy life and not getting smugly annoyed by the tiniest of inconveniences is a trait that people need to practice.
I lived by a popular park in SF and started getting annoyed by them, especially since it felt privacy invading because there was nowhere else that could look into my 3rd story window.
Don't think it should be banned or anything though.
For another 100 bucks you can get an entry level DJI drone that blows this thing out of the water in terms of camera quality, range, features. This is a piece of trash.
I asked elsewhere but can the DJI be easy to operate like this? Just hit a button, have it capture the moment, then it’s done? I don’t want to pull out a controller.
Also at this price point $100 is meaningful. Many people go for whatever is cheapest.
Think about how people buy chocolate. Sure, for $4 you can get a good chocolate bar that's quality, sources sustainable goods, is fair trade, etc. But you can also get a chocolate bar that tastes decent for $1-$2. The "good chocolate bar" is only $2 more, but people are just looking for some chocolate.
not to mention, the pixy flies itself and controls itself which removes effort + a learning curve and that has value.
People are saving $100 to waste $240 on a piece of plastic which will be amusing for a week or two, get boring because the image quality and battery suck, and then it goes to a landfill.
i have drones. drones are hard to use. the killer feature of snapchat is that it’s easy to get content up. you have to keep posting new content cause it decays fast. phones are especially good at taking photos and videos and making them accessible. you may go somewhere or meet someone and within a few minutes have 5+ pictures you want to post. or a couple videos you think would do well. you may have them posted within 1 minute of taking them
drones you have to set up. find a space for them. link them to your phone. tell people to get ready for the shot. make sure the ___location is good. probably do this 3-4 times cause it’s really hard to get a good camera angle the first time. or the timing right.
all of this means even getting one “post worthy” image or video might take you 20 mins. or even an hour. or as i’ve done many times you spend an hour or more messing around with it and don’t like the footage and throw it all away
This product is trying to be the antithesis of that. I have a few DJI drones and I share the same experience - you bring a drone to fly/shoot with a drone, it isn't something you do spontaneously.
But this drone is not the same as a "traditional" drone, it appears you just set the mode, then let it fly out of your hand. No fumbling through an app for BT connection (Until you want to post the content, but Snap glasses make this super easy, the drone will be the same.) No looking for somewhere to launch because the props are guarded and the thing weighs less than a cell phone. No controls needed since it is all just gestures. If it runs out of battery I imagine it just lands wherever it is at. And it is the size of a sandwich, so it fits in a small bag - so you don't need a separate carrying case.
I think the idea here is that snapchat is trying to solve that user issue drones have. If they can make using a drone as simple as TikTok made posting a short edited video, then they succeed here. There are lots of people who want to take drone images, but don't know how to start / what drone to buy / etc. This could (I give it a 30% chance) solve the problem.
Another analogy could be the polaroid camera that 'democratized' casual pictures - this could be the equivalent 'democratization' for drone photography.
i don’t see any mass adoption of drones. the only time drone photos/videos will be common is when your phone can fly. bringing a drone around is a hassle. they are generally big (esp compared to a phone), extremely fragile, expensive, have short battery life. they are everything that made digital cameras hard and more. they would have to be so much better than what we have, but phone images and videos are already so good i don’t see it happening
gopro is this on steroids cause the image quality is so high and file sizes so big you can only really process them at home on a desktop. so do all this work and then take it home, upload to computer, and then maybe process it. i still have hundreds of gigs of footage i haven’t had the heart to throw away yet but also likely won’t review again
proud owner of gopro karma and like 5 gopro cameras. the karma drone i have a fraction of the amount of content from compared to the cameras because it’s that much harder
good example of this is skiing. i would bring my gopro with gimbal and get amazing quality stabilize footage or hold my phone in my hand and get good quality but not amazing. of the videos i watch or share, like 95%+ are from my phone. accessibility is huge
Very interesting to see how not one commenter has even mentioned the company that Snap acquired that made all of what you see possible: CTRL Me Robotics [0] was the one behind all of this and made it possible for Snap to build their own drone.
That's what Snap was doing after making all those acquisitions. Now you would wonder what they would do with their other companies that they acquired. I would not underestimate Snap's ability to innovate and their complete silence and secrecy to ultimately surprise commenters here about what they have built.
As usual, this was unsurprising. [1] After you see who Snap has acquired, you can look back at such wild predictions like this one [2] and just dismiss them immediately.
This is a really good business idea, it's going to be very successful. I also hate everything about it.
The selfie sticks were bad enough but just like you say soon every idiot tourist is going to have an autonomous drone following them wherever they go, capturing hours of social media material that no one's going to care about. Unless they catch you doing something that goes against their boring norms, because then they'll plaster it all over without a care for your privacy. I must have seen a dozen videos of "creepy old man naked in the woods near our children" or some similar phrasing when it turned out every time it was just some hippie nudist who thought he'd have a bit of peace and quiet being outdoors, far away from the city. But you can't go anywhere these days without these gopro morons filming your every move.
Because people love taking pictures and video clips of themselves and this makes it a lot easier to get shots from different angles. It's perfect for the self-obsessed crowd, for social media influencers, travel bloggers, etc. There is already a competitor and I'm sure future products are going to be improved in terms of sensing, autonomous flying and image quality. I'm not saying Snap is going to be market leader, just that such drones are going to sell.
Also autonomous flying has been in the works for other applications for years, now it's simply trickling down to the cheap consumer level where it can get sold to people who've never operated a quadcopter before and a going to buy this as a fun disposable gimmick.
I find it interesting how people always judge products based on their v1.
Yes it has flaws, but early adopters will put up with it, and future iterations will be much better. I think we need to ask ourselves whether, if some things improved, this is a good idea.
I'm a bit surprised they don't mention Snap anywhere on the site except for a link in footer (something like "by Snap"). Generally I would expect much better experience from a single page website promoting one product.
Would like something like this where I didn’t have to use Snapchat.
(I didn’t scour the site, but the few minutes I looked at it did not lead me to believe this would work without Snapchat. Interesting how much they seem to hate text.)
A DJI Mini SE[0] would give you 2.7k video, longer range, better performance, gimbal stabilized video, longer flight time, and GPS stabilized flight for about $50 more. The Mini 2 upgrades the camera to 4k but is a little pricier.
The Mini SE requires the use of a controller. It's small and folds up. I didn't look into it enough to see if Snap's offering requires a controller or just uses a cell phone.
All of snaps marketing suggests no controller. That’s the part that I actually care about - I’m willing to have lower video quality and smaller battery if it’s easy to use in a regular social moment.
Update: reading a review there is no controller. All of the controls are simple on the device itself. This is exactly what I want - I’m not trying to capture amazing drone footage for the sake of it, I’m trying to capture a moment in life without exiting it. I ordered one.. at this price point will be fun to try.
The video makes it look like you don’t need a controller, it just floats around and maybe you can tweak things with your phone, but who knows what the non-marketing version will be like… first off I know it will be loud (they didn’t have any drone sound in the video)
There is a pretty "permanent" NOTAM around Disney World that applies to
>"...INCLUDING UNMANNED AND REMOTE CONTROLLED AIRCRAFT, ARE PROHIBITED WITHIN A 3 NMR OF 282445N/0813420W OR THE ORL238014.8 UP TO AND INCLUDING 3000FT AGL."
I wonder if this will be enforced if people try to bring these to magic kingdom.
Dji mini 2 is superior to this in every way for not much more money except for the tracking. The new version 3, coming out is rumoured to have active track.
What on earth is this from a business perspective? Take a social media company that's more successful than twitter and start producing commodity consumer electronics. Yeah, fuck scale, screw network effects, let's get into that market. Maybe one day they can be as valuable as gopro. And by as valuable as GoPro, I mean 45x less valuable than they currently are.
My city has banned drones within city limits, for pretty good reason I think - the noise alone is enough to make them a plague on any busy public space. This kind of cheap quick to deploy device could permanently change people’s expectations and lead to bigger drones everywhere. With that in mind, I will personally be harassing anybody I see using one of these.
this drone could fill a BIG niche! drone manufacturers have been obsessing over the gadget enthusiast audience and that means neglecting the ability to do simple-but-manually complex things such as launch->detect you->frame you->follow you.
If they really do that and add in motion gestures with automatic upload to the Snapchat app interface, that's killer!
I like the playful design. Reminds me of the Minolta Weathermatic Type A[1] with its flat yellow body and picture setting control knob on top. Looks fun
This looks and feels like a rebranded drone from any random Chinese drone producer... is there anything novel about this other than Snapchat integration?
Some of the promo videos have terrible stabilization. Guessing this will fall even flatter than their glasses.
Ease of use and product design are certainly novel, not to mention marketing the product to a customer outside the traditional drone consumer segment (i.e. tech focused/interested adults).
Yeah I suppose it would be interesting if the new market latches on, but I've seen a number of selfie-drones that more or less follow the same form-factor (albeit, less yellow) and have similar features.
Where did they find a beach where drones are allowed to fly? especially given that the video seems to be shot in SoCal. I mean if you have you own private beach then of course a small drone would be a nice addition to it :)
With civilian drone use pretty much de-facto banned, the military seems to be the only blossoming ___domain. One can imagine how a soldier sends a small drone to look around the corner and/or into the windows of the higher floors in a city battle like Mariupol.
I remember seeing bunch of years ago guys in Stanford testing very small drone which would be parked by wrapping itself around your arm, and flying/following you on command.
Interesting that the Snap branding is pretty buried on the page, seemingly only in the about section at the bottom. The design language seems like it's snap, maybe that made it obvious enough?
This will get interesting from a regulations perspective. How much does it weigh? It looks like it might be sub-250g, which would exempt it from Remote ID and registration of flown under the recreational exemption. If not though, you’ll need to stick a big old broadcast module on the top of it next year.
Where this drone is more like a stickless selfie stick, I can see people using it during things like Stadium TFRs, flying over crowds inadvertently, etc.
You thought the e-scooter debris in historic cities was bad, if these take off they'll be clogging up historic monuments in a European capital near you soon.
I really like that Snap is pushing the envelope with hardware devices. This push might make drones mainstream.
There are obvious issues like how light the device is and how well it would do under windy conditions. Or that the image is not stabilized on a gimbal.
But this is definitely a step in the right direction.
I won't work there : "We contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together."
Do they really believe that ? Can't they just say they sell a fun toy to those who can afford it ?
I do not like when it becomes a puzzle and multiple clicks to find tech specs. Also I really dislike this "lasts longer" style description of a battery life / flight time. I would very much prefer X minutes when hovering and no wind as a rough measure.
>We contribute to human progress by empowering people to live in the moment
How is every social media company so painfully self-unaware? Is this just a "it's impossible to get a man to see a problem he is paid not to see" kind of situation or do snapchat employees genuinely believe that they are helping people "live in the moment" by developing an app that encourages the exact opposite?
Is it really a pivot? They are all about letting people share video stories made using their ecosystem. They pushed the software (filters, etc.) as far as they could so now they are pushing the hardware. You can't code a "first person view" or a "third person view" filter. So glasses & drones it is.
Products and services for people who won't accept anything behind the lens distracting from the other side. A drone controlled by a simple mode wheel selecting from five behavior presets fits right in.
This product is illegal right next to Snapchat's HQ in Venice Beach. You can't use drones on the beach in the state of California due to rich people being concerned about the paparazzi spying on them
Honestly as someone living in Cali, I appreciate not dealing with the constant buzzing noise from 10 different tourists flying drones within earshot of me while I'm enjoying the beach.
Nothing ruins a vibe like BBZbzbzzbzzzZzbzbzzzzzzzZzzzZz
I wonder if it can take 360 panoramic pictures The Orbit flight path seems that it looks at you. I would like something that looks outward. Contacted support but the rep couldn't answer my question.
Some of these shots can easily be replicated with a 360 camera (InstaOne, GoPro MAX etc) mounted on a pole. Not as hip, perhaps, but makes tracking drones seem a bit unnecessary in many cases.
Say what you will about Snap, I'm all for fun new electronics, and I've often wondered whether a product like this could be viable. Excited to see how it does!
To dive straight into the low end is viable only for a large corp that can subsidize it and/or the massive marketing blitz. I highly doubt they're making money on the $250 price tag unless they sell several million. Anyone else has to start at the high end / specialty, and work their way down.
Huh? If you take a look on aliexpress you can find drones that are better in every measurable metric (except ease of use) for half the money. This thing probably has an insane markup.
This is one of those moments where the thing itself as it exists now doesn't excite me, but you can already tell the next several iterations (maybe by a different company) could start to get really exciting. Having a little, quiet drone following you that can record things or communicate information to you via voice commands or beam live video to your phone might be really useful. No more getting lost! Just head up and see where you are. "Hey drone, pay for my coffee." "Hey drone, where's my dog?" "Hey drone, take a picture of us." "Hey drone, harass that person if they come within 20 feet of us, and take a photo of their face." "Hey drone, lead the way to the Hilton hotel." I'd love a little flying computer!
This won't happen until there's serious advancements in battery or anti-gravity technology. This snap drone's batteries are rated for flight times in the single digit minutes.
I don't understand anyone that's bullish on SNAP. It's been my least-used social media app for years (except for FB proper, I still use IG daily), and doubly so now that TikTok is so addictive. Their glasses were a terrible flop, and this will probably be worse. There is absolutely no cohesive vision.
Are you a software company, a hardware company? A social network? I guess this is what happens when an app that was mainly used for sending nudes in high school goes meteoric with Silicon Valley money. This is probabbly what would've happened to Flappy Bird if the owner hadn't shut it down.
This seems like it's begging for an FAA smackdown. Drones under 250 grams are exempt from registration, but are still subject to other restrictions.
This thing seems to make autonomous flight decisions, so it can't possibly comply with FAA rules requiring a pilot in control. Is it smart enough to avoid flying over people or cars? Probably not. Betting it will also happily let users send it off into no-fly-zone airspace, and that it doesn't have any kind of a manual killswitch to force a landing if it decides to do a 'flyaway' malfunction.
Looks like each flight is 10-20 seconds and you get 5-8 flights[1] which is like 90 seconds of flight? Additional batteries are 20 bucks so I guess they're going with making it easy to swap batteries rather than giving it a long flight time.
like their glasses, there's a limited supply and then they're not produced for a while. I think it's taken them around 4 years to do two iterations on their glasses.
Description of Mark: The mark consists of the letters "PIXY" in a stylized font, with three partial circles representing smoke blooms over the letters.
I don't think they are competing against DJI. Did you watch the promo video? It's very clear who their target demographic is and it's not people who would buy a DJI.
Yeah but if it’s even remotely successful DJI will have an identical product on the market and undercut them like they have done with every other drone.
Is this a serious question?
Snapchat has 300 Million Daily Active Users with a user base that skews affluent and young (globally). That's ~$1.50 per user which is relatively low monetization rate compared to rivals.
My hope is the females of the world decide selfies are narcisstic, predictable, and shallow.
They refuse to watch programs like the Kardashians, and selfies will just die out like disco.
(I guess there's nothing wrong with getting ahead with your physical looks. I watched my sister pretty much write her ticket in life do to how photogenic she is.)
This is a pretty good sign that its time to short SNAP. This is so far outside their core competency, and in such a crowded market, that they must be desperate to try this.
