Wild and Weird, Drone Racing May be the Sport of the Future
Drone racing already has deep grass roots—there are dozens of local and regional drone races every month. Now some want it to go mainstream
The LED lights on two racing drones are tested at the Drone Racing League offices on July 28, 2016 in New York.
You may not have realized there was a
first National Drone Racing Championship—that happened last summer in
Sacramento, and while around 120 people competed then, almost nobody saw
it. Almost nobody saw the World Drone Prix in Dubai this past March
either, although 250 teams entered and the winner, a 15-year-old boy
from Somerset, England, took home $250,000.
But drone racing already has deep grass
roots—there are dozens of local and regional drone races every month.
The Drone Nationals which are run by an outfit called the Drone Sports
Association, or DSA, are the biggest swing anybody has taken yet to
bring the sport to the mainstream.
As young as it is, the origins of drone
racing are still shrouded in mystery. “About four years ago you started
to see stuff out of Australia about it,” says Nick Horbaczewski, CEO of
the Drone Racing League, which notably did not run the Drone Nationals
this weekend—not only is drone racing now a sport, there are several
competing professional circuits. “About two years ago you start to see
communities forming online—forum posts, how do I build a drone, where
can I race it,” Horbaczewski adds. The basic idea is, you get a bunch of
drone flyers together. You lay out a course. You route the video feed
from your drone’s forward-facing camera through a pair of VR goggles,
which gives you a drone’s-eye-view of the action. This is called
first-person view, or FPV, and it makes you feel like you’re inside the
drone, or possibly like you are the drone.
Then you fly the drones around the course
at around 80 miles per hour. They make a noise like angry robot bees,
especially on tight corners, and there’s a lot of crashing, but it’s
hugely fun—people describe it as like being in a video game.
It’s also harder than it looks—racing drones don’t work
like those easy off-the-shelf ones. The control schemes are much more
complex and hands-on. Instead of an app on your phone you use a fat
remote control with two joysticks which you manipulate simultaneously:
the left stick controls throttle and yaw, the right stick handles pitch
and roll. The first time you fly a racing drone you’ve got about as much
chance of keeping it in the air as you do of driving a Formula 1 car
out of the pits without stalling. “There’s a lot of calculations, and
you’re doing it in three dimensions at very high speed,” Horbaczewski
says. “When you watch the really good pilots, it’s like they’re using
the Force.”
For the racers it is, by all accounts, as
much a mind game as anything else: Uou have to have nerves of carbon
fiber to keep your fingers steady under racing conditions. “In other
things where there’s competition involved it’s usually gross motor
functions,” says Conrad Miller, a father of four from Boise, Idaho, who
flies under the name Furadi. “If I’m racing a motorcycle, I’m nervous,
but I’ve got my whole body to control this thing. When I’m flying a
drone I’ve only got my thumbs. When you have all that adrenaline
coursing through you, it’s hard to control your fingers.” Furadi made
the finals this weekend and finished fourth overall.
If drone racing is hard to do, it can
also be hard to watch: the drones are small, and they tend to look a lot
alike, so it’s not easy follow the action or even tell who’s winning.
In a professional race the drones are usually equipped with bright
colored LEDs so you can tell them apart, but it’s a major challenge for
promoters and broadcasters and everybody else who’s trying to turn drone
racing into a major-league business. The bar is high: there’s a high
rate of infant mortality among newfangled sports leagues—for every
Electronic Sports League (booming) and World Surf League (thriving)
there’s a National Xball League (paintball).
So far drone racing may be running a year
or two ahead of the broadcast and display technology, like VR and
augmented reality, it will need to make it must-see entertainment.
“We’re going to be entering into the world of multi-stream,
multi-screen, multi-broadcast,” says Scott Refsland, the DSA’s chairman
and chief evangelist. He imagines a future scenario of blended-reality
events where audience members can race along with the pros virtually and
remotely. “If you looked at a field with the naked eye, you would just
basically see four drones. Whereas if you put on something like
Hololens, now there’s 12 drones racing, and you get all the markers, all
the various leaderboards, who’s what, who’s where, who’s in first.”
Given that the racers are already essentially flying computers, it
should lend itself well to high-tech innovation. “It’s a 21st century sport,” Refsland says. “It’s made for that. It’s Running Man–it’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger come to life! It’s The Hunger Games!” (It
could be argued that Arnold Schwarzenegger is in fact already alive,
and the Hunger Games were actually a dystopian atrocity, but you see
what he means.)
The business trends are in their favor, anyway. This year the Drone Nationals attracted some blue-chip sponsors, including AIG
and GoPro. According to the NPD Group, drone sales over the six months
ending in April of this year were four times what they were in the same
period a year ago. The FAA estimates that Americans bought a million
drones in the 2015 holiday season alone, with 2016 sales projected at
1.9 million. The DSA is setting up a World Drone Racing Championship in
October, to be held at Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii, where Jurassic Park was filmed. We can assume that no expense will be spared.
Time.com
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