AR.Drone Academy
Parrot decided to deliver a flight analysis and social networking connection feature called AR.Drone Academy. You post your flights to the Academy, and can see the flight video with telemetric data overlayed. You can also check the local map and see where others have posted their flight data to find decent spots to fly. You can also post flight video sans the telemetric data to YouTube and FaceBook.
Here is a video from Parrot on how the Academy works:
Very cool, right? Yes, if it worked properly. First of all, none of this feature set is available on Android. IOS only. In addition, it is labeled as a beta feature, and I can confirm that it does not work in the original iPad at all, despite what the Parrot website marketing would lead you to believe. I wish that Parrot listed compatible devices for the Academy, but they don’t.
I went ahead and loaded FreeFlight on my wife’s IOS6-running iPad 2, where it does support the Academy functionality. Here are some screen shots of the Academy menus and some data from a flight from yesterday:
And the money shot of the telemetrics overlaid onto the flight video (screen capture only as this view is only available in the Academy):
I wish that I could swap the meters to feet in these overlays, but otherwise this is really cool. See the graph in the lower right? That is the flight profile. It shows the altitudes that you achieved and is synched with the video. This is really nice, and is available once you load one video to YouTube. However, it is not available on Android and appears not to work correctly on hardware older than the iPad2 and iPhone4. In addition, I’d like to be able to load this view, with the telemtrics overlaid, onto YouTube. That would really be nice, but is not available at this point.
