Pokémon Go encourages you to leave the comfort of your house and explore the great outdoors on foot, getting a little bit of exercise as you make new friends and capture what you need to fill out your Pokédex. But that doesn’t mean players aren’t already finding creative ways to be lazy.
Tumblr user Perchbird shared a gallery, spotted by Thrillist, showing off his wonderful creation: a drone attached to his phone, all controlled by the AirDroid app. Using the app, he is able to interact with his phone screen via his computer and play the game remotely, or at least that was the plan.
Theoretically, this would allow him to sit in his backyard and let the drone do all the work, but Perchbird says it doesn’t work as intended.
“I actually don’t recommend this at all because the phone messes with the compass and pulls you out of GPS mode,” he says. “If you do attempt this, make sure to be in an open area where a falling phone can’t hurt or break anything as well as maintain line of sight with your drone because of compass issues.”
There’s potential for the phone to fall because no mount was used to hold his phone it place; he simply taped it to the landing gear.
“This is like a Team Rocket scheme to capture Pokémon,” one Reddit user added.
Pokémon Go does a pretty good job of determining whether or not you’re actually walking, which could further limit Perchbird’s diabolical scheme. Yesterday we tested the egg incubation feature — which requires you to walk about a mile before a Pokémon hatches — and found that, when we tried to satisfy this requirement by driving, it wouldn’t register distance unless we slowed the car to a crawl. Leave it to Pokémon to make sure we get our exercise.
