Apparently, when you combine GoPro cameras, drones, and LED lights in the right way, you get something that is equal parts awesome and undeniably, unabashedly dorky: Nighttime drone racing. It’s the sort of thing that is probably a ton of fun and looks crazy cool in the video below, but if you walked by a park and saw the elaborate setup this requires, with a bunch of people excitedly flying tiny helicopters through hoops, it would seem like the most ridiculous thing ever. In other words, a thing that’s good on the internet is not always good in real life.
Anyway, this drone racing looks a lot like something from the computer-themed world of Tron, or a high-speed video game like F-Zero. In fact, the only thing that could make this video cooler is if the drones were launching missiles at each other or were being piloted by tiny Nintendo characters—but they wouldn’t really be drones if they had tiny pilots. Maybe that means the next evolution of nighttime drone racing is creating a real version of Tron or F-Zero, complete with little pilots and dramatic storylines. Actually, having said that, we’re starting to lean a little more toward the dorky side than the awesome side.
