It’s easy to get on Kickstarter these days, and companies compete for attention and quick funding with lofty promises. When we saw a drone advertising its “mind control” capability we couldn’t help but trying to get one for a test.
The Udrone is not a bad tiny drone. The control is accurate when you fly it via an app on your phone. It’s light and small. The camera quality is ok for the price. But, a mind control drone it is most definitely not.
The drone also comes with a lot of gimmicks like facial recognition that doesn’t really work either.
The company said via the headband, the system can read the pilot’s brain waves and brain electrical activity. The headband also tracks facial movements and then converts all of these inputs into instructions that control the drone’s flight.
The drone would take off when the user thinks hard enough about taking off.
So we put that to test. The drone more or less takes off and lands at random. Blinking and tilting sort of works, but it has little to do with “mind reading.”
Currently, the product is off Kickstarter. The company moves the campaign to Indiegogo. It made us think just how much you can get away with inflating your product, especially with drones.
A good drone is not easy to make cheap. It takes a tremendous amount of work in a variety of fields including signal, software, cameras, gimbals, and more hardware.
The U-Drone doesn’t seem to have that. However, for the price point, it is still a decent drone, but it certainly doesn’t work with the mind reading.
