Skip to main content

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

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.

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

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
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