Skydio boasts 13 cameras that power really impressive collision-avoidance tech, allowing it to track a person even through obstacles like woods. Check it out:

Here’s how the “Autonomy Engine” works:

The device looks bulky, but it’s said to fit into any backpack that can accommodate a 17-inch laptop. Being roughly 3x the price ($2,499), size, and weight of a Mavic Air, the Skydio makes me ask a few questions:

• What’s the average utilization of any drones people buy? They seem like action-sports cameras: aspirational, highly specialized, rarely used. (Thus it made perfect sense to me that GoPro would get into the drone business, and that doing so might just compound their existing problems.)
• How important is this kind of aerial selfie mode that really sets Skydio apart? That is, what percentage of the time one wants to use a drone is it for, say, mountain biking through the woods? The obvious concern is that it falls into a real niche (the small Venn diagram overlap of “actually doing action sports” and “wanting to view from the air”).

[YouTube 1 and 2]

We’ve just returned from spending a week in Leadville, CO, which at 10,200 ft. is the highest incorporated city in the US. Despite the inevitable dehydration insomnia that always afflicts me there, I didn’t find the elevation quite high enough, so I brought my Mavic Pro (piloted by a custom-printed “Googler” minifig) to capture a few shots of Leadville from above. You can find some 360º panoramas (uploaded to & embedded via Google Maps) and videos below.

Quick observations in case you’d find them useful:

• DJI Goggles do make it easier to fly while panning/tilting one’s camera, and I got my smoothest shots yet. On the downside, I’ve yet to figure out how to adjust the picture to look fully clear to my eyes (with or without glasses), and the fact that you apparently can’t just put them into head-tracking mode before a flight & keep them there is a pain.
• 360º panorama capture is totally my jam. Whereas I find capturing video stressful (is it smooth enough? will anyone find it interesting?) and editing video laborious, shooting panos is almost trivially easy. Having said that, I ran into a few snags:
• Downloading & installing the needed firmware update took several tries, due partly to dodgy mountain WiFi & partly to the DJI app’s less-than-straightforward flow.
• An inscrutable, non-dismissible (!) warning screen would sometimes pop up to let us know that we were a few miles from an airport. It blocking most of the screen, coupled with the wonky path one must follow to invoke pano capture mode, meant that we blew it on at least one pano, accidentally capturing 180º instead of 360º—and facing the wrong way at that!
• I found that Facebook wouldn’t recognize the panos as panos, so after some searching I found & downloaded the metadata-tweaking tool Exif Fixer. Running it on the images did the trick.
• Stitching images on my iPhone X was fairly quick (taking perhaps a minute for a full 360) and did a pretty good job (PTGui, which I downloaded, seemed to do no better). On the downside it sucks that the process is modal, blocking you from using the app to fly, so you’d probably do well to wait & stitch after landing.
• The exposure on what might’ve been my best pano was totally blown out for reasons I don’t understand. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Happy Chinese New Year from above Yunnan, China:

The intriguing reversal of footage reminds me of this beautifully sad passage from Slaughterhouse Five:

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Ricardo Martin Brualla works at Google Seattle with my fellow Adobe alum Dan Goldman (who—small world—sat across the street at Adobe when he implemented Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5). Anyway, Ricardo recently worked some imaging magic on 360º imagery captured at the top of the Space Needle. Check out the timelapses that resulted:

[YouTube]

The smart folks responsible for HDR+ on the Pixel 2 are sharing a big dataset in order to help other developers create better high-dynamic-range imagery:

Today we’re pleased to announce the public release of an archive of image bursts to the research community. This provides a way for others to compare their methods to the results of Google’s HDR+ software running on the same input images. This dataset consists of 3,640 bursts of full-resolution raw images, made up of 28,461 individual images, along with HDR+ intermediate and final results for comparison.

[O]ur hope is that a shared dataset will enable the community to concentrate on comparing results. This approach is intrinsically more efficient than expecting researchers to configure and run competing techniques themselves, or to implement them from scratch if the code is proprietary. 

According to a recent survey, more than 40% of people under 33 prioritize “Instagrammability” when choosing their next holiday spot. Of course, a ton of the results look incredibly similar, perhaps inducing cases of vemödalen (“the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist”). They’re so repetitive, in fact, that Google researchers have built 3D timelapses from overlapping imagery.

Maybe more people need a “Camera Restricta” to “prevent shooting unoriginal photos.” Or maybe we shouldn’t sweat it, because “there are many like it, but this one is mine,” and because “in the end we shall all be dead.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Via]