With a few
taps, you can now direct Skydio‘s $1,999 autonomous drone from your Apple
Watch, allowing you to fulfill the geeky dream you never knew you had:
directing an expensive autonomous drone with your little wrist computer.
The very
cool R1 self-flying drone will also be going up for sale in U.S. Apple Stores,
a big win for the young drone startup that has only been taking orders via its
own website. Apple doesn’t have a very robust selection of drones either, with
most of their selection coming from drone giant DJI, putting Skydio in some
pretty elite company.
Now, let’s
get back to the real question here. Why on earth would you need to control a
drone from your Apple Watch? Well, it’s certainly a valid question. The Apple
Watch launched with a ton of third-party apps, and one by one they kind of
seemed to drop off as developers — and Apple — learned that the device is
generally at its best when it’s part of a passive experience.
Skydio sort
of bills the R1 as a drone built for the GoPro crowd, delivering a very unique
type of footage but ultimately one that can be self-controlled. Navigating the
Skydio app on your phone always takes you out of action for a bit and makes it
so that you staring at your phone is always the first part of every cinematic shot.
With Apple Watch support, some use cases make a lot more sense than others.
People who use the drone to video themselves while biking will probably find
this particularly useful, as the controls are all of a sudden in a much more
accessible place on your wrist. Otherwise, the Watch support makes the very
niche problem of controlling a drone in the most low-key way possible just a
little bit easier.
The Watch
app has a very straight-forward UI and really gives you a lot of control over
the drone. You can cycle through the list of skills, tapping modes like Lead,
Follow and Orbit and putting the drone to work, but you can also interestingly
identify people in the R1’s feed for it to follow, as well. It all works
surprisingly well on the Watch, and feels like an unusually powerful set of
features for the device.
For the
Skydio user, the Watch is now in your control repertoire. It’s certainly not
going to be the most logical piloting mechanism at all times, but if you’ve
been looking for more effortless ways to direct the R1, you have some new
options.
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