Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Snap is making… a drone? 🚁”.
So the first question you probably have is why: why is snap making a drone or as they want to call it a flying camera? It’S a good question. I’Ve been following snap’s interest in making something like this for several years, it’s been something they’ve wanted to do. For a while i mean snap calls itself a camera company and yeah. It is kind of out of left field, but that’s really the history of snap, if we think about it dating back to renaming from snapchat to snap and releasing spectacles and those yellow vending machines.
Now they have ar spectacles on the hardware side, but those aren’t really a thing, yet you can’t even buy them. This is something i could see: people who have never been into drones getting into just because of how easy it is to use it’s affordable. It’S approachable! There’S a low barrier of entry to getting it running, editing sharing it with friends.
I think that this thing actually has a shot at being successful. I could see it being good for parties. I could see it just being something you want to take when you’re going on a hike. The four main flight patterns are hover, reveal, follow and orbit.
There’S also a favorite mode, where you can tweak something like say, have reveal be 20 feet instead of 30 feet and set that on the device itself, all the footage is saved on device with a 16 gigabytes of hard drive, and then you can sync it either. Over usb or wirelessly to the snapchat app where it lives in the memory section of snap. After that, you can export it anywhere. The editing tools are fun and easy to use. You can add music special lenses which are ar effects that snap makes, and also do a cool, auto cropping feature that just automatically makes it vertical on you.
The person that it’s tracking, the way that this thing tracks is interesting because it really is focused on a person. It can’t track a dog, it can’t track a car, you have to look at it, hold it up and then let it go out from there. That’S an interesting choice that makes it really centered on people and what you’re doing with other people.
Snap tells me that it’s not great at tracking multiple people in the same shot, but we were doing shots throughout the day with multiple people in frame, and it tracked me just fine. It’S definitely not going to follow you or do any crazy moves like some of the higher end drones out there that have ai technology. But you know at this price point: it’s the best i’ve seen you know the battery is a limitation, but it’s not something. That is necessarily going to break the experience for you. They sell these little extra battery packs that are easy to to pop in and out and each pack they say gives five to ten flights of power. They won’t say exactly what the battery life is.
Uh frustratingly, but it’s good enough, and you know the device itself is very light but sturdy. You know we dropped it a couple times and it’s it’s fine yeah. I bumped the ceiling, it’s kind of durable.
I didn’t uh set the the length appropriately, i would say the thing that impressed me the most about this is just the fact that it reliably landed back in my hands every time really, and i think that element gives it. This whimsical, just kind of like fun. Vibe that you don’t really see from a lot of devices, especially at this price point, so you know all in all.
This is a solid little camera and the fact that it can do these orbits and all these different flight patterns on its own makes it just really easy to use. I’M not sure that this is going to be a revolutionary device for snap or really change how people think of the company, but i think it has a really good shot at being something that people want to buy if you’ve never used a drone before you’re going To have no problem picking this thing up and using it it’s just really approachable. Now, i’m not so much of a specs guy myself, but the guy behind the camera there v on our team is so vu. Why don’t you take it away and get into the nitty-gritty of this thing sure? So, let’s talk specs, because i’m, i guess, i’m the specs guy alex mentioned some of the hardware details, but let me expand that a little bit.
This drone weighs 101 grams, which is to say that it is very light. It is almost too light, meaning it’s not going to handle wind very well. You really should be mindful of that before launching it into the air. There is a landing button on the app that will force landing if you think you’re about to lose control of the drone.
There are no obstacle avoidance sensors on the body, not that it really needs it. It’S kind of like a nice to have it’s not really meant to squeeze into tight spaces, avoid things and follow you around. We tried. The only extra camera is the one that you find at the bottom of the drone, which kind of helps to recognize hands when it’s coming in for a landing.
Also, you will not find a gimbal here. It is a fixed camera on the body of the drone, and that makes the footage look a little bit shaky at times, but that’ll depend on your flight and win conditions and, honestly, that’s okay. This is a very different drone from what i’m used to using it’s, not the drone that you bring with you to capture the best possible quality of mesmerizing, sunsets and landscapes. It’S more just about giving you a new different.
You know drone-like perspective to your snap videos and it’s also more about you, the user. One thing that did surprise me is that pixi records video in 16×9 landscape orientation. I just assumed that a snapdrone would be making vertical videos for snapchat, but i was wrong. The 2.7k video is saved internally onto the drone and then can be edited on the snap app, so you can take advantage of the auto cropping tool to turn that footage into vertical videos.
In that footage it looks. Okay, we took the pixie outside during a sunny day in l.a and we brought it indoors, surrounded by neon lights. Looking at the footage on a bigger screen, like my laptop, you can really see some of the shortcomings, lots of pixelation invisible image noise indoors, but it’s still performed better than i expected it to. Even when taken outdoors, it was able to balance, highlights and shadows fairly.
Well, it’s not impressive by any means, but it really is just good enough. Okay, i know i mentioned looking at the footage on your laptop, but let’s be real. The likelihood of you looking at this footage on your laptop is very low. The footage will live and will be viewed on your phone and on that smaller screen it actually exceeded my expectations.
Also we’re going to introduce a third hose for this video, so owen, who’s, editing. This video right now has a few impressions that he wants to share. So owen, take it away buddy, what’s up y’all, so one unexpected side effect of using this drone is that unless you, edit out the tail end of your clips, you’re going to wind up with a lot of extra footage, specifically footage of you. Looking like you’re trying to hold the drone’s hand – and i just don’t know what to do with all those extra clips except edit them into a romantic montage.
I think the main thing snap, cracked here is just approachability. I’Ve tried a handful of other drones, ranging from the lower end to the very high end and they’re, all just not something a normal person would easily be able to understand and use confidently. This is the opposite. This thing is just as safe and easy to use, as you could imagine everything down to the way that it’s designed, where you literally can’t even really have your fingers touched by the propellers. It’S so light. It just comes up from your hand.
I mean that alone makes it way more approachable than any kind of drone flying camera. I’Ve seen, i think, that’s going to be the main selling point of this thing. It’S just how easy it is a kid could use it. A reaction we heard when someone saw for the first time was: oh, that’s cute, but you don’t hear about a lot of consumer electronic devices and, while all these other big tech companies are talking in grandiose terms about the metaverse or content moderation, snap is like we’re.
Just going to release a flying, camera and they’re not really saying they have huge hopes for it, they’re going to sell it just online to start, i don’t think it’s going to light the world on fire. I don’t think they’re necessarily going to sell millions of them and i think that’s okay. I think what we need is just more kind of whimsical, fun, easy to use tech and that’s what this is. It’S not revolutionary, but it’s fun.
Thank you so much to valley, relic museum for letting us film in their awesome space, be sure to like and subscribe and check out theverge.com for more on all things. Tech, .