Skip to main content

Who needs a plane when you can skydive from a 28-propellor drone?

At the end of last year we marveled at the bizarre sight of high-profile YouTuber Casey Neistat using a humongous drone to lift him high into the sky. The bonkers Christmas stunt used a specially built octocopter strong enough to lift Casey hundreds of feet into the air.

Possibly inspired by Neistat’s aerial antics, Latvia-based drone designer Aerones recently persuaded a skydiver by the name of Ingus Augstkalns to use a drone instead of an airplane for his next jump.

A video posted on YouTube (below) shows Augstkalns standing atop a 120-meter-high tower just ahead of “the world’s first drone jump,” according to Aerones. Next, we see the huge 28-propeller flying machine buzz up to the skydiver, whereupon he grabs hold of it and presumably hopes for the best.

World's First Drone Base Jump: Daily Planet

With Augstkalns dangling precariously beneath it, the drone flies away from the platform and reaches an altitude of 330 meters before the skydiver decides it’s probably a good idea to let go. The good news is that Augstkalns’ parachute opened properly and he touched down safely. However, there’s no footage showing what happened to the drone, though we’re assuming it didn’t go rogue and cause untold havoc inside some faraway restricted area.

Aerones
Aerones

The enormous contraption took six months to perfect and can carry a payload weighing up to 200 kilograms. Perhaps Amazon might want to use it to deliver larger items that its Prime Air drone can’t handle — we can just see one of Sony’s big-screen OLED offerings flying through the sky with this thing. Silliness aside, Aerones said the stunt was designed to highlight the drone’s potential to act as a rescue vehicle in emergency situations or perform other important work.

“Already in the near future, our technology will save human lives, will help to fight fires and carry out other challenging and significant work,” Aerones’ Jānis Putrāms said in a release. “With this project, we show that we are ready for serious tasks in the field of civil defense and sports.”

Speaking of sports, it was Aerones that last year suggested “droneboarding” as a thing, using another of its super-sized flying machines to pull a boarder across the snow.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
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