fans-have-some-questions-wheres-the-drone-whos-winning

[hok]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/drone-racing-fans-have-some-questions-wheres-the-drone-whos-winning-11554305405?fbclid=IwAR38b0Rzru0SgA12NENf_TRDcbNP5bbFGGh5LBib44Pg1FENz6ooZlV6n4M


AVALON, Australia—Under a big-top tent at a major Australian air show, two drones flew through gates and wove around flags at roughly 70 miles an hour. In the bleachers, first-time drone-racing spectator Paula Cumner was impressed by the speed and maneuverability of the little machines. She also had no idea who won until an announcer proclaimed the victor. “I wouldn’t have had a clue,” said Ms. Cumner, who was sitting with her nephew Harry just a few feet from the race. “I can barely see them.” Drone-racing fanatics hope the sport will be so popular that it will be included in the Olympics. But first, fans need a better way to see the drones, which typically are just 10 inches diagonally across. Even seasoned announcers rely on multiple screens with video feeds and real-time data to figure out who is winning. Some think better cameras, bigger drones and more lights could help.

The New York-based Drone Racing League, which bills itself as the world’s only professional drone racing circuit, says its televised events “ensure our fans understand who’s ahead and who’s behind.” To help viewers see what’s going on, the league lights up drones in different colors to correspond to various pilots. It plans to use higher-resolution cameras on the courses in its coming season so the drones appear larger to television viewers. The league, which just signed a broadcast and streaming deal with NBC and Twitter, has used more than 50 cameras Continued from PageOne in the past to film some races. A company in Australia, meanwhile, has developed a racing drone that’s twice the size of a standard one, and is working on an even bigger drone that is 4 feet across and might fly nearly 150 miles an hour. Last year’s World Drone Racing Championships in Shenzhen, China, used more than 4 miles worth of LED lights to illuminate a track. “At the moment, you go to a drone race, 95% of the people there are people racing, the other 5% are their girlfriends or friends,” said Leonard Hall, lead engineer at Melbourne, Australia-based Freespace Drone Racing, which designed the bigger drones.

“It’s very hard to get spectators.” Drones come in all sizes, but racing drones are smaller than those used for deliveries or to survey mines. Small drones are cheaper and more maneuverable in the air, making it easier for would-be pilots to get involved in the sport. During a race, a camera on the drone beams a video feed of a first-person view to goggles worn by pilots, so the pilots’ view is similar regardless of the drone’s size. What’s good for pilots isn’t always great for spectators. The drones looked like “little mosquitoes just zinging around,” said James Charlton, who attended his first drone race at the Australian air show. He would like to see the drones take more offensive action, like maybe fire projectiles at each other. Making the sport more accessible for casual fans could determine whether drone racing remains a niche interest or develops a wider following. Efforts to make other sports easier to watch haven’t always worked.

An attempt to illuminate hockey pucks during television broadcasts in the 1990s—the so-called glow puck—was derided by many hockey fans and eventually dropped. For television, one challenge for drone racing is that the pilot isn’t physically in the vehicle, said Dennis Deninger, a sports media professor at Syracuse University and a former production executive at ESPN. That could make it difficult for audiences to get emotionally invested, even compared with competitive videogames, or esports, where at least the player is in front of and interacting with a screen. Short segments that offer information about the pilot help, but “if you’re watching two tiny little vehicles or five tiny little vehicles or whatever zipping around and it’s hard to see, you’re going to pretty soon lose interest in who this guy was,” Mr. Deninger said.

Creative camerawork is required for the best views of the drones. During a Drone Racing League event in Atlanta, a camera was run along a cable to capture footage of the drones flying down a hallway. The drones were flying so fast that the camera had to start moving before the drones entered the hallway, but not too soon to miss the action. “The driver of the cable was so absorbed in the beauty of the shot that he forgot to brake,” Tony Budding, the league’s director of media, said in an email. The camera was damaged after hitting a wall and had to be replaced. Mr. Budding says the league has studied how other motor sports, such as car, yacht and motorcycle racing, use on-board and point-of-view cameras to keep viewers informed. Some die-hard fans, usually pilots themselves, bring their own video goggles to races. Sam Prudden, a Ph.D. student in Melbourne, went to a race where pillars obstructed the view of the course, and the metallic nature of the building made it difficult to get a clear signal on his goggles. “You just make the most of it,” he says. “If you’re pushing for someone to win and you can barely see them and you don’t know what’s going on, it gets difficult to get super engaged.” At the air show race, as Ms. Cumner, the first-time spectator in Australia, struggled to make out who was ahead, her nephew Harry was watching the race through video goggles someone had given him. The view, he said, was amazing. But he still couldn’t tell which drone was winning.