Hivemapper Flight View is a new way to interact with videos taken by drones. Instead of browsing videos as lists of titles and thumbnails, Flight View allows you to find videos by location.

Click to watch stunning drone video of SLAC seen through Hivemapper Flight View

Flight View uses our mapping pipeline to transform any video into a 3D map of the world. This map combined with knowledge of where the drone was during each frame of the video allows us to seamlessly transition between the 3D map and high-resolution video.

Click to Watch stunning drone video of Rosewood Hotel seen through Hivemapper Flight View

Why Flight View?

We’ve found Flight View to be a great tool for browsing large sets of drone videos — here you can quickly navigate over 50 drone videos of Coit Tower. With Flight View we don’t have to scrub through a whole 22 minute video to find what we are looking for; instead just click on it in the map and jump right into that part of the video.

Maps can do things videos can not do. Maps are an abstracted and simplified view of the real world. Maps’ design and interaction allow you to quickly move between distant parts of the earth. Finally, maps allow you to look at the world from an infinite number of positions, even if a camera has never been there.

Videos have a level of detail that a map never would; maps aren’t supposed to. A 1:1 map wouldn’t be a map. Videos also capture a dynamic snapshot of an area exactly as it existed; moving cars, trains, weather and all. Maps strive to be as up-to-date as possible, but never capture motion like this.

Flight View combines these media in a way that is better than the sum of its parts.

How does this work?

First we construct a 3D model from frames of a video. Creating a 3D model from imagery is fairly straightforward, and is one of the most common uses of drones in 2016.

We take this one step further by georegistering these models into our 3D map of the world. This means that each point in the model is now tied to a precise location on the globe.

Hivemapper’s secret sauce is that we are able to do this without using expensive survey equipment or ground-based control points. We can do this with any video taken by even a base model DJI drone.

Stay tuned for more details on our mapping pipeline from our colleague Tom.

Upload your drone videos

Do you have some drone videos that you want to see in Hivemapper Flight View, start uploading your drone videos.