Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Casey Neistat built a giant drone that can tow him around on a snowboard, lift him into the air

Kelly Hodgkins
By

YouTube filmmaker Casey Neistat has won Christmas with an epic holiday-themed video that features him as snowboarding Santa who ditches the sleigh and replaces it with a human-flying drone. The footage was shot in Finland at a small village and ski area that looks like it pulled straight from your grandmothers Christmas card. It’s worth a few minutes of your time to watch Neistat and his high-flying holiday madness.

HUMAN FLYING DRONE

The highlight of the video is the massive drone that pulls Neistat up and over everything in his way. There is no commercially-available drone capable of flying a person, so Neistat and his team both designed and built the drone from the ground up. With its eight rotors, the octocopter has the power not only to pull Neistat on a snowboard up a hill but also to lift him hundreds of feet into the air. There is no two ways about it — this drone is a beast.

Recommended Videos

Neistat and cohort Jesse Wellens of PrankVsPrank fame pushed the envelope with the video using the human-powered drone along with cutting-edge 360-degree cameras to capture the stunning footage. Neistat doesn’t shy away from the extreme, going “far and high” with the drone on multiple occasions .

The most exciting segment of the video featured Neistat snowboarding up a slope while other skiers and snowboarders come racing down the mountain at him. It’s like watching a driver go the wrong way down a highway. Also impressive are the flight segments where Neistat flys through the air attached to nothing but the drone. You’ll be on the edge of your seat, shaking your head in dismay as you watch the insanity of him flying by drone.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly Hodgkins
Contributor
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more
4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon
Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.

Read more