Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the Valley of the Temples, a large park of Greek ruins situated on the south-west coast of Sicily. But soon you could be able to get a drone’s-eye view of the sights.
Helmut Hlavacs at the University of Vienna has developed a system that allows people to control a drone as it visits faraway sites. The budding tourist sits at home, wearing a pair of virtual reality goggles. As they move their head, they direct a drone that has cameras pointed in all directions, feeding the view back to the user.
Hlavacs has only tested his system locally, in an open field and on a narrow city street. He plans on making the software work over long distances; if there is too much of a lag between the drone and the goggles, the wearer is likely to become nauseated.Antonio Gentile, founder of InformAmuse, an archaeology app start-up is one of the researchers who has teamed up with Hlavacs
There is also a site Travel by Drone which shows streaming drone video
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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