One example of the peak of that craziness was in 2016, after Snapchat released glasses with an embedded camera, which were more or less received as as a gimmick by their user base, Snapchat changed their name to Snap Inc and told their investors that they're now a hardware company.
IMO it's worth watching the video rather than reading someone's writeup of it. My favorite part is this (written) list of everything that went wrong [1] ... and how much of it is due to the intersection of hardware, software, vendors, and linux
I don't even like carrying the smallest of folding umbrellas around in case it might rain. Then if it does, this thing will hover so far above and away that you get wet anyway optimistically saving up to 50% of raindrops. 50% wet is still wet. If I have an umbrella I hold it close over my head unless I'm covering someone walking with me.
50% is very generous. In the video it isn't even consistently above his body half the time. It is also constantly a good 80cm above him, so even a slight bit of side wind makes it fully useless to keep you dry.
Any wind speed above 20m/s is also going to just blow it straight out of the air or at best heavily reduce flight time.
And then there is the little issue with having a mini lawn mower constantly above your head: loud and dangerous.
Having said that, we can still applaud the creator for bringing their idea to life.
>what was supposedly a small project ended up big and complicated
Welcome to the drone world! So many moving parts and one tiny mistake, you end up losing a $60k drone in the ocean (true story!)
That being said, regulations prevent flying drones of any size above people, unless the drone is high to certain altitude, because of all the dangers that bring, a small issues and the props will harm the people.
I saw this on Facebook before I saw it here. While it bears a superficial resemblance to 1000s of clickbaity tech stunts this one really delighted me. Some of these should be edited into a remastered release of Blade Runner.
noise, autonomy are real constraints. And the wind resistance is a safety critical issue.
To make it wind resistant you need to increase the drone's power/weight ratio which works against battery life/autonomy and weight (more battery, more weight)
This is a nice technical experiment but cannot work as a general public product in my opinion (I build drones since 2013 and know this topic in depth)
tangent: ridiculous that a site called designbloom has such an atrocious user experience. popovers, things that take over your reading space, and just general shiftiness all over the page that's unrelated to the content you are reading.
Yes, I do mean the glowglobe. As they are floating right above the person, they should also protect from rain. And there was a scene where one was floating through the rain.
Lacking a bit of sleep, I initially read this as “anonymous flying umbrella follows and shields users from rain” which certainly intrigued me more than the actual title.
The usecase requirements for an umbrella are not just hovering over the person, and I suspect even that core requirement might not be met in windy conditions.
The other important specs are its weight and space requirement, handling requirement, cost, ease of operation. If it regressed in all these specs compared to the standard umbrella, then it already failed to be an innovation.
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[ 10.1 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_Labs_Nixie
[1] https://youtu.be/EYRrUiM_A6g?si=T60tAChuo-GNtfqW&t=921
They should have used Apple hardware.
I don't even like carrying the smallest of folding umbrellas around in case it might rain. Then if it does, this thing will hover so far above and away that you get wet anyway optimistically saving up to 50% of raindrops. 50% wet is still wet. If I have an umbrella I hold it close over my head unless I'm covering someone walking with me.
Any wind speed above 20m/s is also going to just blow it straight out of the air or at best heavily reduce flight time.
And then there is the little issue with having a mini lawn mower constantly above your head: loud and dangerous.
Having said that, we can still applaud the creator for bringing their idea to life.
Welcome to the drone world! So many moving parts and one tiny mistake, you end up losing a $60k drone in the ocean (true story!)
That being said, regulations prevent flying drones of any size above people, unless the drone is high to certain altitude, because of all the dangers that bring, a small issues and the props will harm the people.
Cool project tho!
This would probably sell in Shenzhen.
The other important specs are its weight and space requirement, handling requirement, cost, ease of operation. If it regressed in all these specs compared to the standard umbrella, then it already failed to be an innovation.