3D Robotics

Drones on cover of New York magazine

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Another datapoint on the mainstreaming of drones: a long cover story in New York Magazine. Cool inside art, too (see below). Here's a sample of the piece:

Drones are a different kind of new technology from what we’re used to. The communications breakthroughs of the past two decades have multiplied the connections within society, but drones offer something else: the conquest of physical space, the extension of society’s compass, the ability to be anywhere and see anything. This physical presence can be creepy when seen from the ground, in ways that echo the imaginings of science fiction. “Flying,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, who ran the robotics program at NASA’s Ames facility, “creates this dynamic where people are no longer on top.” And yet to the drone pilot, maneuvering through the air, it is liberating.

It’s an incredible thing, extreme elevation. It makes you feel both alone and unsurpassable. Send a drone up, equipped with a camera, the control in your hands and your laptop rigged to see what the camera sees, and what you feel is not displacement but extension. Each of these flying robots, more than anything else, changes your perspective. Now anyone with a drone can watch the Earth from a point of view that once implied great power. This summer, the pastor of a prominent Evangelical megachurch in Texas delivered a series of sermons comparing God to a Predator drone.

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There is something uncanny about the drone perspective that creeps up on you, the more videos like this you watch. The drone’s point of view emphasizes the mass scale over the individual. One of the early drone videos that got around, enough to collect nearly 2 million views, is a vision of last year’s Burning Man, roving across the encampments—the huge sculptures, the big empty desert beyond. From high above the festival, individual distinctions blur and the people look almost choreographed. The man who shot it, a San Franciscan named Eddie Codel, had been going to the festival for years, and he told me he was intrigued by the way the drone removed you from the usual individual perspective—­circumscribed, on the ground—and let you see the “organized chaos” of Burning Man as a whole.

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Comments

  • Good article and, as you say, fantastic animated graphics.
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