“Drone” is one of those words that perfectly fits the thing it describes, like “gash” or “poodle.” It’s blunt and cold and vaguely sinister. But drones don’t have to be scary, and as autonomous flying technologies trickle down from foreign airspace to civilian life, they’ll inevitably lose some of their creep-factor.
Recently, a group of designers at frog spent some time trying envision what that future might look like, dreaming up a new class of drones that are both friendly and functional—and designed expressly for personal use. Today, drones blow people up. In 2020, they might take the ultimate selfies.
Paparazzi, the selfie drone, is one of the two concepts that emerged from frog the workshop. It’s a far cry from the Predator. The craft “lets you virtually stream your entire life to all of your social networks without pulling out your phone or even lifting a finger,” as the designers put it. A spherical, stabilized camera shoots pics and video from the perfect vantage point, buzzing into position to account for lighting conditions and making sure it captures you from a flattering angle every time. It’s the logical conclusion of our self-shot obsessed culture. It’s a little bit ridiculous, but only a little bit.
These future drones stay anchored to their owner like a satellite in orbit.
Whether or not we’ll reach the narcissistic summit of robotically optimized selfies, Paparazzi does succeed in challenging our expectations of what drones can be and what they can do. And that was very much the point of the exercise. For the workshop, frog’s designers put themselves in the year 2020, trying to imagine a landscape in which which drones had become as ubiquitous as smartphones.
“We see a lot of connected products, connected spaces, and connected cities really starting to mature at this point, and we see drones as a really good intermediary between people and all these connected objects in the future world,” says Eric Boam, one of the designers who worked on the project, along with Adam Pruden, Kyle Becker, and Sheldon Pacotti. “Sometimes in order to push through to new ideas, we need to put ourselves into a new context.”
The other concept the group settled on was Guardian Angel, a drone that’s billed as “the ultimate accessory for serious runners.” In addition to serving as a constant, hovering bodyguard on a solitary jog, the craft could also offer a number of novel fitness-related features.
It could zip ahead to set your pace, drawing on data from a heart rate monitor to figure out when you’re lagging and could be pushed to go a bit harder. It could also stand in as a proxy for your previous runs, kind of like the ghost drivers in Mario Kart—or even let you race against another drone-equipped friend remotely in real time.
These types of drones are something entirely different than what we’re familiar with today. They’re still machines that fly autonomously, but these future drones stay anchored to their owner—something more like a satellite in orbit than a probe piloting itself through space. And if you look at these drones in the context of another emerging tech trend, they become something else entirely: an off-body wearable.
“We did have a handful of concepts that looked at the drone as a wearable,” Boam says. One idea called for a device that landed on its owners shoulder, like a parrot. Another concept that the team was fond of was a sort of futuristic, self-operating umbrella. Taking the form of a bracelet worn on the wrist, it would use weather services and on-board sensors to anticipate rainstorms. When the time came, it would take off from the wrist, position itself above the owner’s head, and divert rain with ultrasonic pulses.
Granted, a wearable umbrella drone might be a little too radical, even for 2020. Still, the group’s other concepts tackle the challenge of what these more personal drones could look like in more subtle ways. The conceptual paparazzi craft looks like a tandem rotor helicopter mixed with one of those ergonomic trackball mice—a much friendlier design than the quadcopters you see executing complex maneuvers with perfect algorithmic choreography in YouTube videos. Figuring out what drones should look like as they take up these new applications will be another challenge for designers.
“The form factor is extremely important, not only for the use case but for the setting in which it’s used,” Boam says. “If you’re outside running alone, maybe you want something that has more of a presence about it. If you’re with friends, maybe you want it to be a little sleeker and a little friendlier. You don’t want a menacing drone surveying your party.”
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