I Flew Insta360's First Drone With a 360-Degree Camera, and It's DJI's Worst Nightmare

Gizmodo

7 days ago

Screw merely flying a drone; what if you were the drone? You're a nimble robot buzzing over those rooted pedestrians far below. Above you is blue sky, below the dry ground, and all around you open expanse and a curving horizon. You can see it all, as if you were a head in a jar looking through an impossible dome. Insta360, a company that's spearheaded 360-degree cameras as an alternative to today's GoPros, got into drones the only way it knew how—by sticking twin, fish-eye lenses on an unmanned aerial vehicle. Yes, this lets you record all your surroundings at once, rather than just a single 16:9 box. The actual experience of flying the drone is more like you're in a transparent globe, gliding over all.
Antigravity, a new subbrand of Insta360, let me take its prototype A1 drone for a spin at a high-speed go-kart track a few hours outside of Los Angeles. The best way to describe the company's strange product is to break it up into three distinct parts. If I were to sum it up, it's a 360-degree camera strapped to a drone, combined with an altered reality headset, and controlled via an old-school arcade light gun. The camera is closest in specs to Insta360's own X5.
The Antigravity A1 offers an aerial experience unlike any I've tried. There's nothing that comes close to the feeling of real-time video hitting my eyeballs whichever direction I look. There's no pricing information yet, though Antigravity claims customers will have it in hand in January next year.
First off, there's the A1 drone itself. It's about the size of a DJI Air 3S with four propellers and automatic fold-out landing gear. It also weighs about the same as DJI's drone at 249g, or 0.54 pounds, plus the arms fold in to make it slightly easier to carry around. If it weren't for the two cameras on the top and on the bottom of the A1 drone, it would look like many similar products of its kind. What's special about this design is that Antigravity managed to make the A1 'invisible' to both lenses. It means you won't see any hint of the quadcopter itself, unless you catch a hint of your own shadow.
The controls are even more unique. The A1 uses a headset akin to DJI's Goggles 3, but Antigravity placed a circular screen on the outside of the left lens that allows any onlookers to glimpse what you're looking at. The first time I showed my colleagues the headset, they exclaimed I looked like the bug-faced Japanese superhero Kamen Rider. Inside the headset, you can freely look around 360 degrees and still see information pertaining to your speed, altitude, battery, and whether you're currently recording.
If you're filming, the device is capturing the full experience around you, so you don't have to be looking in any one direction as you buzz around. There's a small picture-in-picture display that pops up in your view if you're not looking in the direction you're flying. It's helpful if you ever get distracted while in 'Sport' mode and you forget that setting turns off automatic obstacle detection.
The missing piece is the controls, and it's even more out of the box than the rest of the A1. Instead of a two-handed RC control with sticks, you're given a handle with a few buttons on its face and a trigger to control speed. Inside the headset you'll see a reticule that's centered where you point the controls. Flying the A1 is strange, though; you'll end up sticking the controller over your shoulder—as if you were blind firing—in order to fly backwards but keep looking forwards.
The combination of a pair of VR goggles on a drone isn't completely unique. FPV, aka first-person view drones like the DJI Avata 2 combined with the DJI RC Motion 3, let you see your environment as you're recording. These are nimble machines that you can spin, dive, or loop for those intense shots you can only get from an aerial vehicle. They're also more difficult to use than your typical, straight-flying drone. A drone with a 360 camera could offer some of the same versatility without needing to put your expensive aerial device into perilous circumstances.
Flying around with such a bird's-eye view also isn't quite as picture-perfect. My time in LA was my second experience flying the A1. I previously ran it through Brooklyn, NY, on a misty afternoon where the streaming quality wasn't quite good enough to make up for the droplets muddying my view. On the second time out, having multiple drones flying at once in such close proximity resulted in lag and a pixelated video quality. The third attempt was closest to seamless, though I shot all my footage at 5.2K resolution, rather than the max 8K. The image quality at this resolution isn't detailed enough for a YouTube video beyond 1080p. Though let's be honest, even 8K image quality still won't look as clear and crisp coming from an action camera as what you'll see in an Apple Vision Pro without extra time and attention.
It takes time to get used to the twin sticks of most drone controllers, and it takes more effort to get good enough to pilot aerial vehicles. The Antigravity A1 is more intuitive. You point in the direction you want to go, and the drone starts flying. That doesn't mean it's easy. The controller has a number of buttons that can start and stop recording, reset your view, and even control your orientation. The issue is you can't see those controls when flying with the headset. After a few turns around the track, I had a general impression of where each button was, but I would still misclick on occasion. If you want to change the drone to Sports mode to unlock faster speeds, you'll just have to feel around the controller's handle until you can find it.
Even in Sports mode, the flight wasn't as fast as you may expect from high-end FPV drones. Antigravity declined to offer specific specs about flight speed and max altitude, and all the team said was that they would be instituting flight zone limitations based on local regulations (DJI has taken flak for unblocking its geofencing tech in the past). Excusing the odd controller, the in-air experience was closest to flying a DJI Air 3S. You're not exactly nimble, but you're more than capable of flying in straight lines and hovering near the action. I could duck into relatively tight spaces, though even flying through a narrow tent felt harrowing with the pointer controls. This early version of the A1 is also much slower to turn than other drones. At various speeds, the drone would halt in the air as I turned my hand in a new direction. The issue was most noticeable when trying to bank when flying at top speed. Antigravity is still finagling the A1's controls, and it has more than enough time to smooth out the feel and flight.
Traditionalists who would rather fly with twin thumbsticks are likely white-knuckling their traditional controllers looking at the A1's flight stick. After receiving some feedback, Antigravity intimated it was working on a more traditional controller for launch after the A1 hits the scene. However, the company later clarified that plans for various control options at a later date are tenuous. So no matter what, users should expect they'll need to go the full 'immersive' route when the A1 hits the scene in January of next year. Additionally, Antigravity said it will get more feedback through a 'co-creation project.' Drone fans can apply to check out the A1 and offer feedback. You can apply to the program through the company's website.
The Antigravity A1 can help you pull off shots that would be close to impossible on any other drone, even an FPV. A novice like myself could use keyframes to have the camera look upside down as you're flying forward. You can easily tilt the footage to whatever orientation. The Insta360 Studio software makes it easy to add those 360 camera transitions to create a 'tiny planet' effect made possible by the fish-eye lenses. Without that sense of rocking you find on other drone footage, the 360 camera shots may look odd until you create that sense of movement through eliminating the warping effect from the fish-eye lenses and adding keyframes to follow your subject or set up interesting shots.
I wouldn't ever claim I'm anywhere close to a professional at editing footage, but spooling through 360 aerial shots is damn fun, especially knowing that it took very little effort to achieve it. The issue you'll inevitably run up against is how to deal with the warped effect stemming from the unique camera sensor shape. Most modern 360 cameras can shoot in 8K resolution, but the raw footage still won't be as crisp as you imagine it should be without some post-processing and professional editing. The studio software is still a work in progress, but in the end you should be able to take the A1's footage into your favorite editing suite after you set up the keyframes in the Insta360 Studio.
The A1 drone is unique, and novelty often comes at a cost. Antigravity isn't going to sell its parts piecemeal. The drone, controller, and headset will all come in the box together, and we can't imagine it will be cheap. Insta360 wanted its drone brand's first product to appeal to novices, amateurs, and enthusiasts alike. Beginners may not want to spend so much on their first drone, while experts may be disappointed by the control options. But let's be frank, there's nothing else like the Antigravity A1, at least until DJI inevitably sticks its new Osmo 360 camera onto a drone as well, whether or not you'll be able to buy one in the U.S. with ongoing sanctions.
Full disclosure: Travel and lodging were paid by Insta360. Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip.