Selfie Drone Magic

Five Hundred Bucks And Falling

If you follow my Twitter or Facebook social media streams (sorry, LinkedIn, I don't hit you with everything), you saw a link to the UK selfie drone story, where there is a kickstarter with six to seven figures of funding and plenty of pre-orders. Fits in the palm of your hand, flies ten feet or so away from the user, controlled via a smartphone.

Sure, this might seem silly and frivolous... but as the selfie stick shows, and the Kickstarter confirms, there's money in it. And if there's money in the v1, how does the v2 manifest?

Well, I think it gets an avatar so it can be personalized. Also, perhaps more capable than just taking selfies. Imagine search and retrieval capabilities, or holographic projection. Sound in the unit could also help to produce intriguing possibilities, and having more than one might make for more interesting footage.

So imagine where it goes in a few steps, or when people who truly want to self-document to a disturbing degree wind up with clouds of selfie drones. Perhaps they'll be part of routine athletic training, used to monitor and improve on traffic conditions. There's a pretty clear use case for security enhancement, a step up from the dash cam footage. Give me a selfie drone that folds and puts away laundry, or loads and unloads the dishwasher, and you've made my waking hours a lot less compulsive.

But I'd like to get beyond the tactical and into the fanciful, if you'll indulge me for a moment. In the young adult trilogy series "His Dark Materials", the conceit is that the world in which it begins is like Earth, but with visible and tactile manifestations of a soul or spirit animal. Also, let's consider the rise of support animals for those who need them, and how a technological manifestation might be, well, less problematic. And how much a smartphone on some level functions as, well, a support animal.

All tech manifests as magic, if you can step back from it long enough to see how it might be perceived to folks with less experience with such things. Whether or not that magic is benevolent or malicious...

Well, you might see a company of angels at your beck and call, and the end to all sorts of bothersome activities. Others might see a hellish swarm of techno flies, turning every moment of the day into one that has active surveillance.

The story is left to the individual.

But the tech? That may be inevitable.

And if you can advertise on them?

One more vote for hellish flies...

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