Vermeer lets you “Fly the Camera Not the Drone”
By: Becky Harris
Vermeer just launched an AR-enabled, autonomous flight tool for drones. And it is B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
Cinematographers, photographers, and content creators now have the full power of aerial drone photography in their hands, regardless of piloting experience. Using our Maps SDK for Unity, Vermeer lets cinematographers visualize and design complicated aerial shots in a 3D, augmented reality environment, and then send it to the drone to execute autonomously in the real world.
The Vermeer app generates a flight path, including camera angle, based on the user moving a phone camera through the 3D visualization while seeing on screen exactly what the drone camera will see. This means cinematographers no longer need hundreds of hours of piloting experience — or a highly trained drone operator — to fly the drone and capture the shot to precise specifications.
How the app works:
Select your location: Specify your flight area and takeoff location on the map.
Pick your drone: Vermeer is compatible with all the latest DJI drones on the market. The app allows users to customize each flight by selecting a specific drone, camera, and lens.
Design the camera path: After the user selects their location, they’ll see an augmented reality landscape on the phone display. They can then record a camera path for the drone by moving the phone through the 3D model. Pushing the phone forward will fly the camera forward, tilting the phone down will tilt the camera down, and moving the phone up will increase the elevation of the camera.
Pre-visualize and fly: The user can adjust and re-record the camera path until it’s perfect. The user then sends the path to the drone, and the drone executes the shot autonomously. The shot captured with the phone camera will match the shot captured with the drone camera, frame-for-frame.
Vermeer uses our Maps SDK for Unity to provide all of the 3D landscape visualizations in the app. Because the operators use their gestures within the AR visualization to direct the flight, the landscape has to load lightening-fast and with a high degree of accuracy. If the tiles were slow to load or the 3D data didn’t locate features precisely, the recording wouldn’t match the intended path, speed, and camera angle of the drone shot.
“We chose Mapbox because the map is very fast and accurate, so it enables the level of detail in route recording that we need. Mapbox also offers deep and reliable global coverage, so it didn’t limit our market. And the API documentation is very comprehensive, so it made building with it really easy.” ~Brian Streem, CEO and Co-founder, Vermeer
Once the user has sent their desired route to the drone, they can watch the drone on a 2D map in the app as it flies it’s route.
“Mapbox’s GL JS data lets us track a drone’s telemetry data, so we can provide real-time location information about the drone back to the user. The data comes through at 10 API calls per second — that’s really fast! That way, our cinematographers know that the drone is actually capturing the route they wanted.” — Kristoph Matthews, Lead Engineer, Vermeer
Check out the Vermeer app, now available for iOS in the app store, and learn more about building with Maps SDK for Unity.
Drone cinematography made easy with AR and 3D was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.