Roger Fingas
Action-cam maker GoPro will now let Apple Watch owners control their cameras from their wrist. Meanwhile, the company is teasing its first-ever drone — officially called the Karma — due to ship in 2016.
The updated iOS app lets Watch owners preview shots, start and stop recording, and add HiLight tags. Most advanced functions are still reserved for iPhones and iPads.
Along those lines, iOS devices can now pull still images from videos, and locate media more easily by filtering for photos, videos, HiLights, or clips. GoPro says that "nearly everything" should now be viewable on iOS, including previews of high-FPS video. This excludes 4K however, as even the iPhone 6s doesn't support the quality used by GoPro's cameras.
Future updates should bring better HiLights management, and identical filtered views for on-camera media and downloaded content.
GoPro Karma drone
The drone was first hinted at in October prototype footage, but a new teaser webpage has revealed the name and is offering people a chance to sign up for email alerts. To attract subscribers, GoPro is giving away 100 Karmas to list members.
A promotional video posted on YouTube reuses the original prototype footage. The exact specifications of the drone are unknown, but it appears to support at least 1440p resolution — based on the YouTube video — and include some sort of gimbal for image stabilization, since in October GoPro stated that it wasn't doing stabilization in post-production. Gimbals are a common feature among high-end drones like the DJI Phantom series. So is 4K, though smaller resolutions would keep the Karma more affordable.
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3 Comments
A gimbal is not the only way to do high quality image stabilization. The Parrot Bebop does image stabilization in the camera by re-rendering the video with information from the motion sensor. It has a super wide lens and a sensor that is capable of reading a window of pixels in real time. The quality is really quite good but the main win is that the drone is smaller, lighter with fewer moving parts. Since it is software this kind of in-camera stabilization could really bring down the prices of drones while also greatly increasing their safety.
Drone makers likely have plans to use smartwatches more because when linked with the drone, they would be able to keep the drone focused on the target. One drone model had a cord attached to it to do this but that cord would be in view of a camera. The Lily drone does this with a separate locator, which is pretty bulky:
You might have to sync it up when holding it first to let it know the source position but once the drone is up, the accelerometer and gyro data from both the Watch and drone can be compared to get where the user is at all times and it doesn't have to send data constantly, it would only need to send data on a change of direction.
The programmability of the Watch also allows the user to send movement commands to the drone so they can tell it to spiral round the user, do a sweep etc without more limited physical buttons. There are a couple of smart watch examples of this already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxSBNKcvgzc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi6EqiwMnhw
The 3rd party ones would have to include the watch with the drone, which increases the price and then they have to do all manner of support. Using Apple's Watch means they just have to do some app development and it's much less bulky than those dedicated options, which will appear in the footage.
Go Pro needed this product sooner re drone, hope they get to market quick and with a winning solution. But since they got beat up on Wall Street with poor sales of the newest over priced hero, I'm hoping they hit the discount shelf soon. I'd love one then