People often talk about drones offering a bird’s-eye view on the world, but not all birds see in the same way. Most drones are like owls, with their ‘eyes’ attached to a gimbal that rotates to take in their surroundings, but the Antigravity A1 is more like a woodcock – a long-billed wading bird whose eyes are so far apart it’s almost got 360° vision.
But that shouldn’t be a surprise when you realise it’s the first drone from popular action cam vendor Insta360 who says the drone was “incubated by Insta360 in collaboration with third parties” who seem to remain anonymous.
While a woodcock’s peepers are set on either side of its head, the A1’s dual lenses are mounted on the top and bottom of the fuselage, so it can capture the whole world around it at once. It’ll automatically stitch the two views together and let you watch it back in full, while the 8K resolution means you’ll have plenty of pixels to play around with when it comes to cropping in on the best of the action.
Antigravity says the dual-lens setup will also allow you to easily create neat effects, including ‘tiny planets’ that form little spherical worlds from your footage. The drone weighs just 249g, but because it has a camera, you will need to register it before you can take to the skies.
Naturally, it has all the usual safety features, so if you ever feel like you’ve lost control or you’re not quite sure where it is, you can command it to return to where it took off from.
It comes with a motion-sensitive controller that enables you to simply point in the direction you want to fly, and a pair of head-tracking goggles that’ll give you an immersive drone’s-eye view, so you can easily fly in one direction and look in another.
Just try not to collide with any migrating woodcocks… although, to be fair, they should see you coming.
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