Commercial drones initially took off (get it?) as high-performance photography tools for filmmakers from the humble independent to elite studios. Designers not only wanted to strap bigger and better cameras to the things, but focused intently on photography-related technologies. Image-stabilizing flight, motion tracking, and even face-tracking software for ride-along photography (ie. filming a car as it drives down a road quickly).

It’s important to note that this wasn’t just a hyper-specific use case of aerial photography as many laymen might be led to believe. Having stable, dynamic (moving), continuous (changing subject) shots might be taken for granted by audience goers as commonplace in cinema, but producing these ubiquitous shots is actually rather involved and expensive. Drones could help make the process simpler and cheaper, freeing up the budgets of large productions and making techniques once reserved for those productions accessible to lower-budget filmmakers.

Interestingly, this didn’t entirely work out. Yes, drones have become commonplace on movie sets. They even worked their way into becoming the “go-tos” for certain techniques. For instance, they’re now the standard procedure for wide aerial shots and common for filming car chases. But they didn’t revolutionize the industry as some proponents expected them to, and their use-cases didn’t broaden to make them as useful as some had hoped. They found their home in Hollywood as a neat trick to do certain things more efficiently, a well-respected tool in the filmmaker’s toolkit, but they didn’t entirely disrupt the industry. (It’s also worth noting that this was by and large the expected outcome, only certain drone zealots had higher hopes than that.) 

But there’s one amorphous quality that the calculations and machinations of data-driven business insights failed to predict. Something unpractical, and consequently unexpected. Drones are fun to fly. Furthermore, drones already equipped with cameras and supporting technology for filmmaking purposes lent themselves well to first-person-view and flight simulator applications out-of-the-box.

This new enthusiasm for recreational drone flight not only led to a whole slew of new drones – performance drones, racing drones, “trick” drones, and more – but an emergent ecology around competitive drone flying as a sport. Local leagues sprouted up around the country – my own high school registered its competitive drone club as a sports team in 2019. In 2016, when sportive drone flying was well on the upswing, the DRL (Drone Racing League) was founded to capitalize on and codify the emerging hobby as a more traditional sport. DRL ran multinational competitions with hefty rewards, echoing the success of E-Sports in achieving a highly-coveted sportsmanship legitimacy.

Drone pilots are celebrities in much the same way as athletes. The DRL and similar organizations copy the aesthetics of athletics to legitimize themselves as a “real sport.”

Drone racing coincided with another cutting-edge tech fad: virtual reality. The marriage of these two technologies and the exuberant communities that congregated around each of them couldn’t have been more fitting for a marriage. VR hooked up to first-person-performance-drone tech was a no-brainer in creating an immersive and thrilling experience. Drone x VR can be thought of as an even more niche sub-sub-sub-hobby, and might be considered an example of an unexpected application for both drones and VR separately.

Enterprising startup entrepreneurs have also been quite successful in finding lucrative unexpected applications that the early architects of the “drone fever” probably couldn’t have imagined. During my ETBD internship abroad, I worked with a company called Augment. Their software was quite sophisticated and impressive; it presented facility managers (where a facility is usually an industrial building, like a warehouse or factory) with an overview of all the equipment and systems under their domain. By having all the information about the building organized in one place, facility managers could stay on top of aging equipment and complex maintenance processes.

The especially important thing, though, was how this software organized the copious amounts of information intuitively: by presenting the manager with an interactive 3D model of their entire building. It truly looked like something out of science-fiction; one could navigate through the digitally rendered building model with ease, dismantling systems to better identify where problems originate as if dissecting the building itself.

One might wonder, though, how does one get such an incredibly accurate 3D model of their building to import into the software? Well, the client could provide one, but few had such a thing on hand. In the likely event no such model existed, the Augment team would go on-site to the building location. They’d use mobile LIDAR scanners to scan the internals of the building (like the rooms and hallways), but this would be incredibly inefficient to map the exterior of the building. To do that more efficiently, they’d use drones. 

The Augment team repurposed cinematic film drones to take advantage of their sophisticated image stabilization features. But they’d switch out the camera for a LIDAR scanner, to scan a 3D rendering of the building’s exterior. This clever repurposing of cutting-edge technology turned out to be very efficient and effective for quickly creating detailed models of massive buildings.

While this application was certainly unexpected, if we look at the core capabilities and features of drones as a technology, we can create a generalizable template to further extrapolate how the technology can be applied in new ways. Suddenly, the unexpected becomes obvious. At the end of the day, commercial drones present us with a way to stably point some kind of aperture (be it a camera, a LIDAR scanner, or anything else) at a fixed or moving target from an aerial position. Different types of drones afford us more optimized capabilities: some focus on stability and consistency, like in cinematic use cases, while others focus on speed and flight performance, like in sporting applications.

Equipped with this templative framework, we can more easily see how the same features that help filmmakers create sweeping cinematic shots were useful to the Augment team for creating precise models, and this same approach could be abstracted to simply say “importing any large complex shape into a digital rendering.” From this abstracted position, the potential use cases explode: topographers and surveyors quickly making maps, agricultural companies more efficiently managing and understanding crop yields, architects digitizing entire buildings for study or improvement, and more.

All of this drone optimism might seem quite exciting, and it certainly is, but it’s equally important to pump the brakes and remain skeptical of tech hype. Amazon famously championed an ambitious world-changing application for drones: automated package delivery. The ideas ran wild rather quickly: beehive-like megastructures to house fully autonomous drone swarms piloting in and out of warehouses.

But (much like self-driving cars) this arguably dystopian vision of the future never came to pass. The tech hadn’t caught up with the hype, and Silicon Valley’s out-of-touch echo chamber failed to acknowledge the nuances of the real world that prevented this idea from exiting the laboratory. Perhaps one day the tech will mature and our skies will be filled with the whine of ten thousand drones, blotting out the sun with the awesome power of American consumerism and free two-day shipping, but for now, this remains a failed application of drone technology; one that was probably never grounded in reality to begin with.

Commercial drones are a technology with a turbulent flight toward product-market fit. (get it?) While they came out of the gate as tools for filmmakers, that turned out to only be a small part of their numerous niche applications. Competitive drone flying has become its own hobby and sport, with entire leagues and multinational competitions springing up to form an emergent culture around the tech. By applying a generalized template of drones’ core capabilities and attributes, divorced from their applications today, we can make predictions about the myriad of advanced use cases for drones on the horizon. Anything that would require a large physical volume to be digitalized can make use of drones, and that alone hosts a slew of exciting applications. That said, we should remain skeptical of overzealous tech hype. We should all be excited about the future small niches drones will continue to land on.