Antigravity just halved the price of its drone — by swapping its headset for wristwatch control - The Verge

$800 now buys you a follow-me drone instead of an FPV flight experience.

Last year’s Antigravity A1 is the best beginner drone I’ve ever tried. I put a friend who’d never flown into its virtual cockpit and didn’t worry one bit. The A1’s also nice for people who’d prefer to think about flying rather than filming, because you can reframe its 360-degree footage after.

But until today, that meant wearing the company’s FPV goggles and spending upwards of $1,599 on the complete set. Now, Antigravity is halving the price of entry to $799 in the US with a new “Follow Me” kit that replaces the original headset and motion controller with a wristwatch and ring instead.

The idea is that Antigravity can be your robot cameraman, automatically flying, following, and filming you with a minimum of gear.

I took the new kit for several test drives this fall, and I’m cautiously impressed.

Instead of powering on a headset and finding a safe place to sit while you block out the world, you can now pull a drone and a watch out of your bag, power them both on, hold a button to launch the drone from your hand, then walk or ride while the Antigravity A1 automatically films and follows you, dodging obstacles along the way.

You can even wave your arm like a magic wand to nudge the drone left, right, down, up, towards, or away while it’s filming. You get a swipeable preview of what the drone sees on the watch’s touchscreen, and can select various quickshots there or summon a couple of sliders (forward/backward, ascend/descend) to manually fly the A1 out of a jam. The ring doesn’t do anything you can’t already do with the watch; it’s just an extra button so you can launch and reposition it one-handed.

As I discovered after three crashes, the A1 is not yet intelligent enough to dodge everything or stay with me through thick and thin. I took it all around my neighborhood on a kick scooter, and you might want to be careful around power lines, thin branches, or the vertical guy wires holding utility poles in place.

There’s also a lot of rough edges I hope Antigravity will fix, like the sluggish experience swiping around the touchscreen, or how it won’t land on my hand without switching back to manual mode, or how I can’t get it to automatically start tracking and filming me — I always have to find myself on the watch screen, tap on myself, then tap another button to begin. I also ran into an issue where it wouldn’t follow me once I crested a high hill, because it thought it was flying at too high an altitude.

Most of all, I hope Antigravity will figure out how to keep the drone from drifting out into the street or over a neighbor’s fence when I tell it to follow right behind. It’s far smaller than me, so anywhere I go, I feel like it should fit!

But as you’ll hopefully see in my video higher up this story (also on Instagram/TikTok) it’s not bad at following me through a dense suburban environment! None of my crashes so far have crippled the drone, and I like how the watch automatically plays the last seconds of footage from before a crash. It made it very easy to find the drone after.

Antigravity’s new full-coverage propeller guards can also help in case of impact; I saw the drone bounce right off one obstacle and keep flying. They’re included in the $799 set, though existing Antigravity A1 owners can buy the accessories too: it’s $340 for the watch and ring, and $40 for the guards, with a 20 percent discount for those who can prove they already own the aircraft.

Antigravity’s A1 is kind of like the folding Skydio I wish that company had made before it left consumers behind to serve industry instead. The self-flying Skydio 2 similarly had a few crashes in my tests and wouldn’t always stay in its lane. But I’ve long wanted a folding version I could easily stick in a bag, and the Antigravity A1 seems like the next best thing.