Snap launches its first drone
pixy.com
pixy.com
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.
Depending on GPS accuracy in the phone it could work well. GPS waypoint missions are already well established in the drone world.
putting something flat and large like an iphone on a 5" FPV quadcopter would be awkward and bad.
Mavic Mini has a payload capacity around 180g, but it also has a nice camera already.
it is cheap and non gimbal stabilized, so can't expect much more
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.
This is caused by a non-global shutter so you have to spend a lot of processing power to fix it.
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.
>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 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.
Precisely
"Flights" is a bad metric if they don't define it. Whatever your age, gender, income, it doesn't change that it's meaningless.
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...
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.
If you want something that is more "ready to fly" (goggles, quadcopter, transmitter combo) You do have more choices these days:
1) On the more expensive end - You have DJI FPV combo [1]. Is supposedly very beginner friendly. https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv?vid=101601
2) On the low end - Something like this https://www.getfpv.com/emax-tinyhawk-ii-freestyle-micro-brus...
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.
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?"
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.
Images Standard: 4000 x 3000 (12MP)
Video Default: 2.7k Frame rate: Up to 30 FPS
https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039928089236-Pix...
https://time.com/longform/aerial-photography-drones-history/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-turn-of-th...
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.
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.
Can't find it at home to provide some scans, sorry :-/
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.
By basically every measure they’re extremely successful and following the Google strat of their main advertising business finding moonshots.
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.
What is this, alternate history?
Anyway, the point is, my friends have lots of pictures of themselves doing these activities, versus non at all.
I have "terrible" pictures of all sorts of things but what's important are the memories attached to them.
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.
†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.
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?
100% yes and this is why every drone video ever has music over it.
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.
A solution would be to have Snap™ mics that i clip on to my shirt and it syncs with the video while recording.
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.
In the post-tiktok era, it's not that big of an issue.
Most videos will have easily added audio overlays.
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 was in Vegas a few weeks ago at a pool club. The bouncer was checking everyone's bags; not for guns, drugs, or alcohol, but for bluetooth speakers.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/file/coase-problem.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Besides the killer bird will obviously be powered by an AI, can't blame me for nothing.
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.
Someone should popularize an ultrasonic directional Bluetooth speaker for these use cases that won’t destroy the peace of public spaces.
Ultrasonic speakers aren’t even exotic tech. I first encountered one in a museum at least ten or fifteen years ago.
There are some 'open-back' and 'open-ear' headphones that let you hear your environment passively.
Others that have more active environment passthrough such as Ambient Sound from Samsung, also exist.
This might be a useful gift for a cyclist or jogger that needs situational awareness.
(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)
Also beats getting hit by a car that you didn't hear.
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.
Agree with your point, though.
Battery health and actual charge capacity could be different too, depending on how the batteries are stored and how they have been treated etc.
No info about battery life anywhere to be found.
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).
They appear to have deliberately made the batteries as easy as possible to swap out, for this reason (based on the second half of the Learn - "How to Charge your Pixy" video: https://videos.ctfassets.net/svn43w404u4n/6RMiSJPQrtPdQdCoO5... )
EDIT: See also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195565
Battery: 3.85V DC, 860mAh, 3.311Wh
https://fccid.io/2AIRN-006/RF-Exposure-Info/220100298SHA-004...
They look like the "110 pocket camera" of the drone world.
Little more than snapshots, handy, super trivial operation, I guess "5-10 shots per battery".
https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039935499924-Abo...
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.
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.
I'm disappointed in the video quality, but I'm looking forward to the extreme ease of use. Press 1 button and watch it go.
As a DJI mini 2 owner I have to say it doesn't really get easier than that.
But DJI mini 2 has 4K resolution, 30 minutes flight time, can fly miles and are only $200 more expensive.
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.
This is fine if there is stabilization and sufficient lighting.
The best camera is the one you’ll use.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/snap-pixy-review-dont-call-it-a...
Excerpt:
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.
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.
I’m curious to learn about how it does indoors.
Most drones are aimed at people who want to fly something. This is for people who want to be filmed. Totally different UX and priorities.
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).
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.
It does follow mode, follows you automatically, even in a circle if you wanted it to.
Also this mode is not exactly new.. Almost all DJI drones have it, also, the drone would avoid obstacles if it detects anything while following.
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.
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.
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.
Are these all flagging companies as well?
Snap is nearly its IPO price. SNAP's last quarter revenue was down from 4 straight quarters of growth.
FB, NVDA, AMD, AMZN, GM, GOOGL, etc. are all up orders of magnitude from IPO.
It's a fair argument to say that the market is being corrected, and that SNAP is not on a trajectory similar to it's peers (FB, TWTR).
It's worth more than that, sure, but the correction happened almost immediately after the IPO.
Which is why being so far up from its bottom 2 years ago is important.
Although measuring it from March 20' is somewhat deceptive as the whole marked dipped, that wasn't snap specific.
I suppose they're going for the artistically constrained angle, more like a disposable camera.
[Come Fly with Me plays]
...
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?
Makes for fun memories!
I send and receive many snapchats from people, if they were all high quality they would be a pain to load and send.
The people that want great color and stable video will likely be a demographic who do it professionally or are enthusiasts.
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.
When you bring a human into the world, you are going have to explain a lot of it to them.
Drones with 8 or 12 bladed props can be surprisingly quiet, with essentially no whine at all.
This is not necessarily true - the noise is a waste of joules, after all.
Seriously though, noice by electronics should be considered a hazard.
No, thank you
> could actually make alot more teens go outdoors
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.
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.
> 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.
https://michaelbrennen.com/2014/04/12/externalities-2-ronald...
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Pixy is 101g and looks to have an enclosed rotor design: https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039928089236-Pix...
With no information elsewhere and not actually being able to puchase the device, is this acutally "launched" or just announced?
https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039928089236-Pix...
So I'd estimate 2.5 - 4 minutes of flight time per battery.
Do people really love Snapchat that much that they’d choose such a trade off for app integration alone? Seems like a tough sell.
Imagine you're at a party, and someone pulls out their sleek, expensive looking, 4k video drone.
Now imagine someone pulls out this obnoxious yellow square frisbee thing.
Which of these are you more likely to "act natural" around?
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.
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.
That unfortunately won't stop people who think they need this thing because all the cool instagrammers and tiktokers have it.
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.
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.
*all disturbances automatically nullified** immediately
**nullification may include death
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
> fears, anxieties, inelegancies, loneliness, family trauma, time wasting or thoughtless cruelty
would be, to put it lightly, a miracle.
I think learning to enjoy life and not getting smugly annoyed by the tiniest of inconveniences is a trait that people need to practice.
Don't think it should be banned or anything though.
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.
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
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
Another analogy could be the polaroid camera that 'democratized' casual pictures - this could be the equivalent 'democratization' for drone photography.
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.
Come to think of it, I cannot think of any place I'd like this to be operated. Perhaps concerts until they start falling on peoples' heads.
(in reality, the total amount of annoyance dealt out will be severely limited by battery capacity)
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.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/27/15704906/snap-ctrl-me-rob...
Looks beautiful. Feels like dystopian comedy.
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.
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.
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.
And I like it.
(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.)
>"...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.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-bz-disne...
If they really do that and add in motion gestures with automatic upload to the Snapchat app interface, that's killer!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/254449872/pixy-cmucam5-...
Some of the promo videos have terrible stabilization. Guessing this will fall even flatter than their glasses.
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.
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.
Think this is a great step in the right direction and seems completely obvious once you see it.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tourist-drone-inciden...
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.
Do they really believe that ? Can't they just say they sell a fun toy to those who can afford it ?
> We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate.
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?
Sometimes I think my favorite part of the future / present / whatever is how dystopian and utopian it is at the same time with stuff like this.
I sincerely love and hate everything about this. <3
Nothing ruins a vibe like BBZbzbzzbzzzZzbzbzzzzzzzZzzzZz
What's the battery life? What's the image quality? etc.
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 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.
Design looks terrible though, completely encased in plastic like that? They could cut so much weight from it.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/28/23043011/snapchat-pixy-dr...
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:d0...
> Camera containing a linear image sensor; Cameras; Motion-activated cameras; Optical sensors
I had tried scrolling before but now I realize you have to keep scrolling even though nothing is happening.
Jankiest scroll-jacking I've ever seen.
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.)
without camera. Thanks.