This is perhaps a little different, because the drone angle actually did come from DARPA. We wrote a proposal for the same program, and it specifically called

This is perhaps a little different, because the drone angle actually did come from DARPA. We wrote a proposal for the same program, and it specifically called out "flying a drone [in VR]" as a way that they wanted to see your system's capabilities demonstrated. The real aims of the program were to "read out" signals from the brain that would let you control an external device. Depending on the phase and level of invasiveness, these signals were supposed to contain three, five, or ten degrees of freedom. It was also supposed to have a fairly low decoding latency (~100 ms). At the end of the program, a human participant was supposed to demonstrate the system by performing a DOD-relevant task with it. These requirements map nicely onto moving something through space: 3DOF corresponds to x/y/z; add in yaw and pitch to get to five, and a second object gets you ten.