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Color me unsurprised. They marketed it as an action-sport-filming drone, but the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone
by semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Color me unsurprised. They marketed it as an action-sport-filming drone, but the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone filming would be cool. It literally wouldn't keep up with Usain Bolt running the 100m, nevermind a regular person on a bicycle.
Shameless plug: a friend of mine is one of the founders of a competing startup making a self-filming drone that has more than twice the top speed, so is actually usable. They've been shooting on location with top athletes using pre-production models for the past year, first production models are going to final assembly these days.
https://www.staaker.com https://www.staaker.com
Edit: s/full disclosure/shameless plug/ as per discussion below.
- CGamesPlay 10y ago> the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone filming would be cool. This wasn't the reason they failed, though. They sold plenty of units, they just never delivered them.
- olegkikin 10y agoThere are many drones on the market that have high speeds and can follow you. AirDog is one of the well known ones, can go up to 42 mph, costs $1600. The cool thing about Lily was the waterproof aspect. There are very few of them that aren't toys and aren't very expensive at the same time.
- sizzzzlerz 10y agoAnd there is one fewer now
- jacquesm 10y agoNo, there never was.
- Bartweiss 10y agoLily also promised enough 'coordination' to track an athlete from multiple angles over varying terrain and obstacles. That's a much taller order than "follow me", and it doesn't look like they ever managed to get something that could track a skier or kayaker the way they implied.
- dewyatt 10y agoI really don't like when people use "full disclosure" as an excuse to advertise.
- enraged_camel 10y agoI think HN as a whole has way too much self-promotion going on. It's especially grueling when people preface it with stuff like "shameless plug" or "not to push my own product, but..."
- jakobegger 10y agoI find the self-promotion on hacker news about a million times more interesting than yet another discussion about Elon Musks latest ridiculous idea.
- enraged_camel 10y agoReally? I'd rather read about the ridiculous ideas of a person who simultaneously runs an electric car company and a space rocket company, than about some unimaginative CRUD startup that is "Facebook for X".
- jakobegger 10y agoMaybe I'm reading different parts of HN than you are, but I see surprisingly few "Facebook for X" startups mentioned here.
- enraged_camel 10y agoThat's true. Maybe I should have said "yet another JavaScript framework."
- dmalvarado 10y ago2nded
- deleted 10y ago
- tsuraan 10y agoSlow drones can be great for filming parkour runs, where the runner doesn't make a lot of forward progress but instead has a lot of vertical motion through interesting environments. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS1itQxzAc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS1itQxzAc4 had bits that were filmed with a DJI phantom, which isn't a terribly fast drone. Something slow with great obstacle evasion and auto-following would be perfect for parkour (not sure if Lily was supposed to have either feature, though). Still, I'm sure that you're right about the vast majority of action sports.
- harikb 10y agoSee how your tag line "Now you can finally be in front of the camera, and not behind it" sounds now with respect to your comment