Drone Week January 19: Surfing Drones

Welcome back to another edition of Drone Week here on BlogCampaigning! This series of posts It certainly seems like drones are everywhere these days, and one area where they're really making a mark is in surf videos.

A lot of waves are tough to shoot from the shore, and filming from the water often means that videographers aren't able to capture an entire ride. Drones are perfectly positioned to capture surfing, and the overhead angle often gives the action a dreamy look.

Check out a couple of examples of surfing drone videos below.

I like to fly from stugibson on Vimeo.  

If you want to capture some of this footage yourself, the AirDog might be a good bet. I'd say that that biggest problem is that it only has a 10-20 minute flight time. As some commenters have noted, you can't even paddle out in that time in some spots.

I feel like this is only the beginning of drones used for surfing footage, and I expect we'll see even better stuff in the future.

Check out past Drone Week posts on BlogCampaigning. 

Drone Week - January 12 | Injuries! Ethan Hawke! Trends! Swarms!

Welcome back to another edition of Drone Week, my (occasionally) weekly recap of all news drone related. How many people got drones for Christmas? 

As I mentioned in a previous posts, it looks like interest in a drones is at an all-time high. There were quite a few new consumer-friendly models released over the past few months and based on these Google trends for "Drone Instructions" and "How To Fly A Drone", with interest skyrocketing in January, I bet they sold well this holiday season.

How many of those people got injured? 

There was a great Reddit thread this week about a user who had very nearly crashed their drone into water on the first day of flying it. While many had a good laugh at the "pilot's" expense, many others rightly pointed out that this guy shouldn't have been flying the drone so high or without a clue how it worked (in a populated area, and over water!) on his first day.

One of the comments there linked to a gallery of images people sustained from drones. Click through at your own risk.

Good Kill looks like a Good Movie 

Lastly, the trailer for the movie Good Kill starring Ethan Hawke looks like it will be pretty good, dealing with the emotions of the US military drone operators. Will we see  drones as a plot device in more movies over the next year?

That's it for Drone Week this week!

Send me a Tweet at @ParkerNow if you see any other drone-related news stories that are worth sharing.

Drone Week - Have we reached "peak drone"?

Another week, and and drones continue to show up in the news and the blogs. What follows is another of my regular round-ups on the topic of drones.   

Firstly, have we reached Peak Drone? I plugged the word "drone" into Google trends, and it spat out the following chart (along with a bit of a forecast). It's not necessarily the best indicator in the topic, but it looks public interest in drones peaked a few months ago, in December 2013. Either that, or they're becoming so commonplace that people don't need to search for them anymore.

Next up is a cyberpunk-ish video by M.I.A. feature not only drones, but also 3D-printed guns and a glitchy vibe. The whole thing feels like a 90s dream of what the future should have been, but it's still pretty cool. Watch it here.

If you want to terrify your dog and annoy your neighbours, then getting a drone to take your pets out to poo is probably the way to go. 

And apparently the Lithuanian mob has gotten into the drone business, using a gigantic specimen of one to smuggle cigarettes into Russia, 22 pounds at a time. 

And finally, a team is working on creating a type of aquatic drone that will gradually clean the world's oceans of all that plastic. Good luck, guys.

That's it for Drone Week on BlogCampaigning for now.

Drone Week - May 9

I've been a bit busy lately, and haven't had time to do my weekly wrap-ups of drones in the news but here goes: Apparently some chaps at the Imperial College London have created a drone that works as a 3D printer, in that it sprays out a foam-like substance as it flies and can build things. It's supposed to mimic the way that swifts (a type of bird) build their nests, and the researchers say it can be used to repair areas inaccessible to humans, like wind-turbines.

Slashdot reports that in March, a passenger plane nearly collided with a civilian drone. As our skies fill with these little objects, this type of thing will become increasingly common.

And if that didn't terrify you, the news that DARPA is getting funding to create swarms of drones that are less reliant on their human operators and work more as a team with each other might.

And while it's not really a "drone", a company in Florida has created a little running robot called the "Outrunner" than reach speeds of 20mph. It seems to be an early version, so it will be interesting to see what else they can do with it and if it will have any uses.,

http://io9.com/darpa-wants-to-teach-military-drones-the-meaning-of-tea-1572126878

Drone Week April 4: Tom Cruise, Phones and Fukushima

If you've been reading BlogCampaigning for the past month or so, you'll have noticed that I'm doing weekly recaps of drone-related news. You can find the previous posts here. 

First up is a cool post on RoboHub about an organization named Drone Adventures who have done an aerial survey of Fukushima, site of the Tsunami/Nuclear disaster three years ago. It has some interesting observations on the state of the area, but what I liked most is that it seems they are using the same type of drone that ReRoll is using the map the earth for their open-world game. Maybe we'll see Fukushima as the first level?

Next up is Flone, a drone created by a group of artists and computer engineers which uses a smartphone as the control mechanism. Read more about it here. 

And lastly: It sounds like there's going to be a sequel to Top Gun but this time it will be Tom Cruise vs Drones. I'll watch it, but only for the drones.

If you've got any other drone-related news, leave me a comment or Tweet me. Otherwise, check out the other weekly drone posts I've done here.