Drone Racing League Creates End-to-End Cloud Production | Hacker News Reader

Drone Racing League Creates End-to-End Cloud Production

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32 pointsstikit21 comments

I feel like the whole point of drone racing is to have that sort of video game in real life situation. You can have tighter turns, narrower gaps, and far more glorious crashes than you can get IRL... All without the risk to life and limb you see in, e.g. F1.

Recreating the same experience virtually is just boring. Like they took a game idea, made it IRL -- and full of IRL design constraints -- and then took all those disadvantages back to the virtual world. I just have no idea what the league is thinking here.

I think DRL know this and are looking to move to in-person as soon as they can, the article just focuses on their "cloud" move during the pandemic since that's what's what was interesting to the video production audience.

The DRL Simulator is also... not great, even among drone simulators, so I suspect pilots who have been practicing in real life will appreciate the move back to real life as well.

I think it's a cool concept and have been following it for a while, but it's worth noting that they started pushing the stimulator before, not after, the pandemic started. I think maybe to create a feeder league or something?

I think the main idea here is to hook up young people to gambling.

I feel like that takes away part of what make FPV flying fun - there is no risk of injury or death, but you have enough skin in the game based on how much it’s likely to cost to repair when you do something risky to provide the adrenaline rush.

Drone racing has a serious home-build streak in the actual racing robots. Kinda hard to virtualize that. If it's just a video game, what's the point? Maybe as its own racing class perhaps?

DRL uses a standardized quad provided by DRL to the pilots. You have custom controllers and goggles but the craft are all the same. This is my recollection from a video by Nurk (DRL racer) anyway.

And why wouldn't it work? A lot of Cycling turned to Zwift during the pandemic as races were cancelled. And E-sports have been a thing for a while now too.

Tangent warning lol.

I just set up my first FPV drone a week ago and its an absolute blast. I've tinkered with RC trucks/planes/drones over the course of 20+ years but haven't put in enough time to get the natural perspective rotations required to drive them well.

It's a bit of a nightmare trying to figure out what all you need (Josh Bardwell on YouTube and fpvknowitall.com was a HUGE help) and getting everything talking well takes a day or two of tinkering, but it has been totally worth it. Strapping on those goggles makes an enormous difference. I still have a long way to go with stick coordination and just basic flying skills, but now it feels much more achievable and is way more fun.

Something I've been wondering about - are your goggles stereoscopic, and does the drone have two cameras? I've (very, very briefly) looked in to FPV stuff but quickly get lost in marketing stuff that doesn't seem to clearly indicate if stereoscopic equipment is available.

No stereo with the DJI goggles but there are some that do support it. There is enough reference info in the relative motion of objects while you are moving to create a 3D space in your mind. This instantly evaporates when you stop moving, however, particularly when near foliage.

I haven't seen anything off-the-shelf, but I think this would be a really fun thing to set up. Maybe with a wider camera spacing to get some depth perception even at longer distances.

Usually just one camera. I'm not sure if you could mount two far enough apart to get a good angle for a 3D tree.

No, almost all FPV pilots fly in 2D. Adding two cameras to an analog FPV setup would be trivial, but stereoscopic goggles are fairly non-existent, you'd have to try to produce a pipeline to get video into stereoscopic VR goggles without increasing latency to an unusable level - a very hard problem, really!

With that said, I fly a lot of FPV (planes and wings) and I've never felt wanting for true stereoscopic 3D. I have flown a simulator on Oculus goggles in stereo and the experience wasn't that different - I think there's enough movement / visual cue that your brain is good at interpolating the 3D aspects anyway.

Vast majority of the FPV systems out there are indeed monoscopic. Stereoscopy is too resource-intensive for FPV, and it never caught on.

The only viable digital system out there, DJI’s Air Unit and their Goggles, is really pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with available silicon, and they can only do a single-channel 720p low latency video stream over the air.

Attempting to do digital FPV in stereoscopy would require additional compute on the encoding stage, and an additional Tx on the air unit. The AirUnit is rather chunky as it is, so having something that can do 2 simultaneous 720p channels would hardly be viable for a 5” drone, let alone 3”.

It would also use extra radio channels too, halving the number of available channels (determining how many pilots can fly simultaneously; currently at a max of 8 - at least theoretically).

The rest of video systems on the FPV market are still analog (in PAL/NTSC).

Interestingly enough, a few years ago a rather obscure Chinese FPV brand Skyzone had goggles which supported a stereo FPV camera block.

Basically, their rig had two cameras, each transmitting over its dedicated video Tx, and the goggles were equipped with two video Rx (VRx) units, each capable displaying video on a separate goggle display (left/right eyepiece). Most analog VRx units used for FPV today have two separate receivers, but they are used in ‘diversity’ mode, where they are tuned to the same channel. Skyzone also had twin Rx setup, but they could do both diversity and stereo.

Thinking of it today, it was an amazing piece of speculative innovation that FPV is rife with, but as I said: it never caught on.

People that used it were like ‘wow, it’s different...’ but I never saw anyone do a build with that for something more than a ‘Hey look: stereo FPV’ type of YouTube videos.

My guess is: you need to get rather close to stuff in order to be able to perceive depth afforded by a stereoscopic system with cameras set at a distance small enough to fit on an FPV drone. Possibly a bit too close, for an FPV drone. So it never really made sense I guess, and so it never caught on...

I would imagine you could quite efficiently encode a second view that's largely the same as the first You'd need more processing power, but not much more bandwidth that way. But the VR 180 videos I've seen so far just seem to do side by side encoding. I guess you need hardware accelerated encoding and decoding for practical use so that's preventing such a new codec for now. Unless the side by side approach is already efficient at this

There are stereo lens adapters that might get the job done without any additional electronics. Resolution would suffer but the extra spatial acuity might make up for it.

Yeah, this seems like a great idea. Let's combine gambling with video games kids play..

Sites like loot.bet have been around for a while now.

Gambling is already a huge part of esports. Huge. Getting a glimpse into that world helped me make sense of the whole phenomenon. (as in: oh that's why there's so much money in esports)

That’s not a strong argument to support this or any stance.

Watching the thread to see if different arguments or observations appear.

Not supporting it, just noting that gambling + esports is already the status quo. I find it pretty gross, but after getting a glimpse into that, and who's bankrolling and advocating which things, et c., the whole space made a lot more sense to me.

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