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.
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?