The Hover Camera might just be the ultimate selfie camera
Zero Zero Robotics just unveiled a consumer-friendly autonomous drone that uses embedded Artificial Intelligence to capture photos and video wherever you go.
The Hover Camera is Beijing-based Zero Zero Robotics’ first product, and it certainly a most impressive one. Dubbed a “consumer-friendly autonomous flying camera” by CEO and co-founder Meng Qiu Wang, the Hover Camera automatically tracks your face using a machine learning model trained on an NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU, capturing photos and videos wherever you go.
The Hover Camera is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 2.3GHz Quad-core processor, and uses a downward viewing camera, a sonar sensor, as well as visuals from the front viewing camera to gauge its speed and height, allowing it to always maintain a level position. This processing power is also what allows it to do real-time facial and body recognition so that it can accurately follow you around without the need for GPS.
The Hover Camera's carbon fiber cage allows to catch it safely while its in flight.
The 13MP camera does both stills and 4K video, and includes a panorama function. There’s also an Electronic Image Stabilization feature to keep stills and video steady when capturing while moving, and the camera will hover on its own once you release it. So you can just unfold the frame, and let it go. Measuring just 182x132x32.5mm and weighing just 238g, the Hover Camera is certainly very portable. Also, because it is below 250g, you won’t have to register it with the FAA if you’re in the United States, and certainly not in Singapore if you’re flying it for non-commercial purposes.
One more note about the frame though; it’s made of carbon fiber so it not only keeps the drone safe, but makes it safe for you to grab, throw or catch the Hover Camera even while in flight. Special care was taken in its design so that the frame would provide safety to users but not hinder the drone’s flying ability.
According to ZDNet, the final version of the product will be released this summer, so hopefully we’ll have pricing and availability updates to bring you in a few months. Meanwhile, here's a video demonstrating how it works.
Sources: NVIDIA, ZDNet, Zero Zero Robotics
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