We've seen drones before; they're not new.
Amazon has plans to use them. Google and Facebook are likely to follow suit. They've been used in the military for the past few years, and have been on the retail market since before 2010. So what can this technology do that will really impress us? Electronics manufacturer Parrot came up with an answer: Oculus Rift.
Parrot? Does it talk?
We saw Parrot's last "project," the AR Drone 2.0, at CES last year. It had what we thought were great flight-enthusiast-pleasing features – things like GPS support and 4GB of built-in flash memory.
It could create real-time renders of the landscape it saw and flew 50% longer than the average drone.
What it didn't have, though, was Oculus Rift support. For that, they made the Bebop.
Keep calm and drone on
Maybe you're not into super-high-tech leisure quadricopters, I wouldn't blame you. Maybe you wouldn't want a 14-megapixel fish-eye camera-equipped drone that has an upper limit of 2km in range. And heck, features like programmable flight paths and optional Skycontroller peripherals just might not be for you. Again, that's OK.
What you'll miss out on, however, is a chance to plug in an Oculus rift (or any other pair of first-person view glasses) and steer your drone from a first-person perspective.
There are some creepy – and potentially helpful – implications here, which I'll avoid talking about, but think for a moment about how cool that really sounds.
Want to see what your neighborhood looks like from 4,000ft in the air? Of course you do and the Bebop is an intuitive (but definitely not the only way) to do it.
