Matty Augustine from Vancouver likes to fly drones. But that doesn’t quite cover the extent of his passion. He likes to fly racing drones—small and lightweight, but incredibly fast and nimble machines. To bring his hobby to another level, he controls his drone via virtual reality headset that allows him to see through the lens of the camera mounted on the drone.
Forget about the retail machines sluggishly hovering through the air. FPV (first person view) drone racing is already a full-blown sport with a recent championship in Dubai distributing one million dollars in prizes.
Yet, while tournaments tend to be focused on efficiency, leisurely freestyle often favors flamboyant tricks—loops, spins, near-miss fly-bys and pass-overs.
Augustine says his videos are real-time footage, meaning he didn’t speed them up. He even offered proof—a video where he mounted his phone on the controller and filmed his flying the drone while we see above his hands a stopwatch app running on his phone in the same frame.
Before you start to consider a career of a drone racer, it’s worth mentioning the activity seems rather consuming.
Augustine works “5-6 days a week, 10 hour days,” according to his comment under the video on Youtube. But between building and flying drones and editing his videos, his hobby appears to occupy most of his free time.
“If I’m not editing, flying or building I’m sleeping,” he wrote.
