Drone Flying App Uses Augmented Reality

Using augmented reality for drone navigation has been around for a while. But now a new app for iPhone allows a different kind of flight automation.

Available now in Apple’s App Store, the Vermeer Beta app displays a 3D map of the intended drone flight area so that pilots can see the terrain from various angles. Users can then use the visualization to chart the flight path of the drone.

“All photographers, videographers and content creators can now execute even the most complex aerial shots without hundreds of hours of piloting experience. We’re building a mobile iOS app to enable a creator to design their shot in an augmented reality environment and then send it to the drone to execute autonomously in the real world.” Vermeer Beta

“People don’t care about the drone,” says CEO and founder Brian Streem, “They care about the picture. This is true for filmmakers and photographers. It’s true for real estate agents who are marketing their properties, and it’s true for construction site managers who are monitoring the progress of their high-rise.”

While they are hoping to hook in new customers from outside the creative world, Streem and his team certainly have the experience. Streem also founded Aerobo, an aerial video and photography company that has worked on more than 100 TV and movie productions, including The Greatest Showman, True Detective, Mr. Robot, and several Marvel series on Netflix.

Companies like Epson and Edgybees add augmented reality to the manual flight experience. The difference with Vermeer is that it uses the technology to set the flight path pre-flight. This frees users to focus on being the in-flight camera operator.

Vermeer is in Beta stage, so they’re hoping to find new users and to get feedback, so they can keep improving the app.

Apart from camera drones, perhaps we are seeing a snapshot of the future of autonomous vehicles. Augmented reality and self-driving vehicles share technologies in the field of computer vision.

The little amount of feedback so far is mixed, so we’ll have to see how close this is to becoming a “game changer” for drone owners and pilots.

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