Screw merely flying a drone; what if you were the drone? You’re a nimble robot buzzing over those rooted pedestrians far below. Above you is blue sky, below the dry ground, and all around you open expanse and a curving horizon. You can see it all, as if you were a head in a jar looking through an impossible dome. Insta360, a company that’s spearheaded 360-degree cameras as an alternative to today’s GoPros, got into drones the only way it knew how—by sticking twin, fish-eye lenses on an unmanned aerial vehicle. Yes, this lets you record all your surroundings at once, rather than just a single 16:9 box. The actual experience of flying the drone is more like you’re in a transparent globe, gliding over all.
Antigravity, a new subbrand of Insta360, let me take its prototype A1 drone for a spin at a high-speed go-kart track a few hours outside of Los Angeles. (Full disclosure: Travel and lodging were paid by Insta360. Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip.) The best way to describe the company’s strange product is to break it up into three distinct parts. If I were to sum it up, it’s a 360-degree camera strapped to a drone, combined with an altered reality headset, and controlled via an old-school arcade light gun. The camera is closest in specs to Insta360’s own X5.
The Antigravity A1 offers an aerial experience unlike any I’ve tried. There’s nothing that comes close to the feeling of real-time video hitting my eyeballs whichever direction I look. There’s no pricing information yet, though Antigravity claims customers will have it in hand in January next year.
A Consumer Drone Like No Other
First off, there’s the A1 drone itself. It’s about the size of a DJI Air 3S with four propellers and automatic fold-out landing gear. It also weighs about the same as DJI’s drone at 249g, or 0.54 pounds, plus the arms fold in to make it slightly easier to carry around. If it weren’t for the two cameras on the top and on the bottom of the A1 drone, it would look like many similar products of its kind. What’s special about this design is that Antigravity managed to make the A1 “invisible” to both lenses. It means you won’t see any hint of the quadcopter itself, unless you catch a hint of your own shadow.
The controls are even more unique. The A1 uses a headset akin to DJI’s Goggles 3, but Antigravity placed a circular screen on the outside of the left lens that allows any onlookers to glimpse what you’re looking at. The first time I showed my colleagues the headset, they exclaimed I looked like the bug-faced Japanese superhero Kamen Rider. Inside the headset, you can freely look around 360 degrees and still see information pertaining to your speed, altitude, battery, and whether you’re currently recording.
If you’re filming, the device is capturing the full experience around you, so you don’t have to be looking in any one direction as you buzz around. There’s a small picture-in-picture display that pops up in your view if you’re not looking in the direction you’re flying. It’s helpful if you ever get distracted while in “Sport” mode and you forget that setting turns off automatic obstacle detection.
The missing piece is the controls, and it’s even more out of the box than the rest of the A1. Instead of a two-handed RC control with sticks, you’re given a handle with a few buttons on its face and a trigger to control speed. Inside the headset you’ll see a reticule that’s centered where you point the controls. Flying the A1 is strange, though; you’ll end up sticking the controller over your shoulder—as if you were blind firing—in order to fly backwards but keep looking forwards.
The combination of a pair of VR goggles on a drone isn’t completely unique. FPV, aka first-person view drones like the DJI Avata 2 combined with the DJI RC Motion 3, let you see your environment as you’re recording. These are nimble machines that you can spin, dive, or loop for those intense shots you can only get from an aerial vehicle. They’re also more difficult to use than your typical, straight-flying drone. A drone with a 360 camera could offer some of the same versatility without needing to put your expensive aerial device into perilous circumstances.
Still Working Out the Kinks
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