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Drone Racing League Wants To Be the Next NASCAR (bloomberg.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the fly-fast-turn-left-fly-fast-turn-left dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Drone Racing League has secured a series of significant investments that it hopes will be enough to turn drone races into a spectator sport. The quadcopter drone racing scene has only exists for a few years, so it's still fairly disjointed. Rules and standards vary between organizers, so it can be hard to have fair races. The DRL aims to fix that. In doing so, it hopes to take lessons from NASCAR and the growing e-sports leagues to find an audience. "Often, pilots wear virtual reality goggles that receive a feed from the camera embedded on the drone and maneuver as if they were in the craft itself. That first-person feed is also recorded and used as raw material for the content produced by the Drone Racing League." The high speeds combined with the ability to make interesting (and photogenic) courses may appeal to people who find car racing too boring.

4 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Radio-controlled racing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    ...already exists since the mid-1970s.

    Granted, the largest R/C vehicles are about 1/4 scale.

    Why is reinventing the wheel so popular these days?

  2. Boring... by RobinH · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is spoken like someone who's never been to a race. The cars (while mostly old technology) are being pushed to the edge and the drivers are in the car so if something goes wrong, they could, and have, been killed. The engines are powerful enough that the ground shakes. Look, I'm not a huge fan of NASCAR, but even I can see what the draw is, and I just don't see it with drone racing. I'm not saying drone racing won't have an audience, but looking at NASCAR for inspiration doesn't make much sense.

    --
    "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
    1. Re:Boring... by Opportunist · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Ok, that explains why people do it. But why the fuck watch someone else do it? I don't understand the appeal of daredevils and the like either. What's interesting about someone jumping over a canyon? Doing it yourself, ok, I can see how this could be some adrenaline rush. But watching? Please.

      Do you want to tell me that it's exciting for some people to watch others on a roller coaster?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Millennials by Viol8 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They seem to think everything they think up is new and unique and has never been done in the history of humanity before. Drones are just a special type of R/C helicopter with auto stabilisation, but don't tell them that. They think they're an entirely new type of vehicle. Bless.