Drone racing poised to become new sport of future

Be it in the field of security or improved studies of land and atmosphere, drones have proved their mettle in every way, and with advancement in technology now they can be pitted against one another in a race.

"There has been a growing excitement around the prospect of a new sporting league where competitors race that very futuristic sounding vehicle -- a drone," a report in The Verge said on Saturday.

A drone is a remote-controlled, incredibly agile, little flying machine that can move at speeds of over 160 km an hour, and unlike most racing sports -- cars, horses, dog sleds -- would have no human on board.

The "pilots" stand with goggles on and control the drone based on a live video feed from a camera on the drone's nose. This is called first person view racing.

But what is so different about it? Besides the fact that drone-racing poses no risk to humans, the developers do a mix of first and third person views to grab eyeballs.

"This means that sometimes you are watching from the perspective of the drone, zipping through turns and blasting along straight ways while other times you are watching from the sidelines as the drones whiz by," the report said.

To add to the excitement and making them visible against a background at high speed, the US-based Drone Racing League covered each drone in colourful LED lights and matching rotors, so that they pop against the background.

"They also introduced a lot of crazy atmospheric elements -- drones crashing through glass lightbulbs! Drones rising through thick fog! Drones chopping up innocent plants! -- which work well in an edited montage, but might not pan out in an actual race," the report said.

The pre-season of the league was held on July 11, 2015, and the Level 1 round will be held on February 22, 2016.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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