The first-person drone experience has arrived
We've seen drones before; they're not new.
Amazon has plans to use them. Google and Facebook are likely to follow suit. They've been used in the military for the past few years, and have been on the retail market since before 2010. So what can this technology do that will really impress us? Electronics manufacturer Parrot came up with an answer: Oculus Rift.
Parrot? Does it talk?
We saw Parrot's last "project," the AR Drone 2.0, at CES last year. It had what we thought were great flight-enthusiast-pleasing features – things like GPS support and 4GB of built-in flash memory.
It could create real-time renders of the landscape it saw and flew 50% longer than the average drone.
What it didn't have, though, was Oculus Rift support. For that, they made the Bebop.
Keep calm and drone on
Maybe you're not into super-high-tech leisure quadricopters, I wouldn't blame you. Maybe you wouldn't want a 14-megapixel fish-eye camera-equipped drone that has an upper limit of 2km in range. And heck, features like programmable flight paths and optional Skycontroller peripherals just might not be for you. Again, that's OK.
What you'll miss out on, however, is a chance to plug in an Oculus rift (or any other pair of first-person view glasses) and steer your drone from a first-person perspective.
There are some creepy – and potentially helpful – implications here, which I'll avoid talking about, but think for a moment about how cool that really sounds.
Want to see what your neighborhood looks like from 4,000ft in the air? Of course you do and the Bebop is an intuitive (but definitely not the only way) to do it.
A game of drones
It'll leave the contents of your stomach where they are
I have a sensitive stomach. There are jokes amongst the TechRadar team that confirm this to be true. Maybe you're concerned a first-person view of the world will be too intense and maybe, just maybe, you're right.
This thought isn't new to the team at Parrot. The Bebop's product manager went through great lengths explaining how the fish-eye lens and 3-axis stabilization system work together to limit the nausea-inducing part of the ride.
This seemingly will work well in first-person, as well as aid in the video capture process. Less shake in the air will produce better pictures and video when you're back on the ground.
The 8GB of on-board memory is a step up from the model we saw a few years back, and the camera now captures in full 1080 x 1920p HD. It even has a built-in dual-core processor to process all the awesome shots.
AA battery-powered remotes are the new dinosaurs, extinct
It's called Freeflight 3.0 and it works on Android 4.2 and iOS devices, tablets and phones. It has all the functionality you'd expect – i.e. control sticks – and some you would not, like the ability to customize flight plans and cloud-based storage options.
Add in the separately sold Skycontroller peripheral and now you're really ready for flight school. It hooks into most tablets available on the market and swaps traditional joysticks for the tactile-less touch controls.
Without it that 2km range isn't achievable and, perhaps more importantly, the Skycontroller provides an HDMI port for your Oculus to plug into.
For an enthusiast product it all seems so well put together…
Trouble in Quadridise
There are some things that don't add up to the yet-undisclosed-but-guaranteed-to-be-expensive price tag.
For example, it has a 12-minute battery. I'm no expert in the field, but this can't be far from the norm. That said, is 12 minutes enough time to even travel the aforementioned range of 2km? Henri Seydoux, founder and CEO, says yes, it is. "It flies fast," he said at a press event held last week at the Mint in San Francisco.
That wouldn't be so bad if it charged in the same time, unfortunately that isn't so. While no number is final a representative at Parrot told me it wouldn't be out of the question for the Bebop to take two to three hours to reach full charge.
Still, it's better than buying a 64 pack of AAs.
Adding it all up
Consumer drone technology, especially the kind as powerful as the Bebop is, is still fairly new. We don't know its implications and is something we'll continue to discuss as it becomes a reality.
Regardless of the potentially dangerous implications, the Bebop is a cool piece of tech made even cooler by adding in Oculus support. The pairing makes sense here, and for a certain niche audience this will be the must-own gift when it hits shelves around the holidays.
The Bebop by Parrot and optional Skycontroller peripheral will be available Q4 2014 and as of May 9 there hasn't been a price-point announced.
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