This video has been going a bit viral on Youtube and at the time of publishing was heading north of 700k views. It purports to show a prototype phone case that is in fact a drone. There appears to be no controls on the drone so it’s ‘designed’ to simply hang in the air and allow the user to nip in front and snap a selfie, either using the phone’s timer or perhaps a generic bluetooth controller.
Anyway, at first glance it seems pretty amazing and would be a workaround to snapping selfies in selfie stick banned zones like Disneyland, but there’s room for caution. It’s probably fake (‘probably’ is perhaps being generous).
Fake?
There are many clues. The way the phone really doesn’t move in the air at all and the way the user deactivates the ‘drone’ while it still hangs in the air. The propellors seem real enough but we don’t think they look like they’d offer enough stability to have it work as well as it does. Two props is highly unlikely to be enough to stabilize things – there’s a reason drones have four, and although the video goes into some detail about the control system, based around the Arduino micro-controller, it just doesn’t look credible, even for a proptotype.
And then there’s the obvious, fake motor sounds that don’t sync with the action.
So fake or real? We think clearly fake, but to be honest we don’t really care. What we do think though is that the concept is pretty awesome and surely someone will make one of these for real at some point. A stripped down drone that’s simply designed to hang in the air and hold a phone seems like a pretty useful gadget to us.
What do you think?
