FLYBIRD VR

Discover Miami like never before with Fly Bird VR! Glide over landmarks in an immersive, educational VR tour. Stay curious, keep flying, or plunge into the virtual ocean!

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Inspiration

The magic of flying over a city like Miami and glimpsing its landmarks from above inspired us. We wanted to recreate that thrill for everyone, making each view not just a sight but a story and a learning opportunity through the power of virtual reality.

What it does

Fly Bird VR offers an immersive, interactive aerial tour of Miami's key landmarks. Users engage with real-world aerial footage and real-time data, enhancing their learning through gamification elements. It's not just a tour—it's an experience that educates and entertains.

How we built it

The aerial images were taken using Insta 360 cameras attached to a Vulcanair V1.0 aircraft and a camera platform that drops from the air. This special platform is made from simple materials like a pool noodle, a parachute, an ESP32 microcontroller, and is held together with lots of duct tape and zip ties. The camera platform is released from the plane, and after a set time, it triggers a cutting device made of nichrome wire to open a parachute. This setup allows us to capture exciting footage of the camera free-falling from the plane before the parachute deploys for a safe landing.

We developed the Fly Bird VR experience on the Unity framework. We implemented custom logic to enrich the 360 aerial footage with geolocation data, in order to map key points-of-interest into an immersive and interactive experience.

Challenges we ran into

Aerial Footage & Hardware

Weather

Flight was supposed to take place Thursday morning but wind canceled flight.

Safety

Ensuring the safety of both airborne operations and ground areas is paramount when considering the release of objects from an aircraft. This involves meticulous planning and strict adherence to protocols to prevent any items from causing harm upon descent or posing a risk to the aircraft itself. Key considerations include:

  • Careful Calculation of Drop Zones: Selecting and securing areas where the likelihood of impacting individuals or property is minimized.
  • Aerodynamic Packaging: Designing the items to be dropped in a way that they do not interfere with the aircraft's operation, ensuring they are free from entanglements.
  • Compliance with Regulations: Adhering to aviation and safety regulations to coordinate the drop, including timing and conditions that favor a secure execution.

These measures ensure that operations are conducted without endangering people or property on the ground, and without compromising the safety and integrity of the aircraft.

Software

Georeferencing

Enriching aerial footage with metadata about the landmarks and points-of-interest is a manual and tedious process, making it a laborious and highly technical barrier for organizations to create impactful experiences in a cost-effective manner.

Given the timeline issues caused by weather and other risks of capturing the aerial footage, we discovered that it would be challenging to integrate the location data into the VR experience quickly enough to meet our deadlines. This challenge is increased with the uncertainty of the specific flight plan and which landmarks would be captured.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The team managed to quickly build, test, and iterate on the hardware unit to safely and accurately deploy the descending camera unit, allowing for extra opportunities to mitigate the weather challenges to the flight plan.

To mitigate the quick turnaround of enriching the VR footage with geolocation data, we were able to develop core logic to dynamically generate the enrichment data to shorten the time to get from raw footage to a usable experience from days to minutes.

What we learned

We learned that there are a lot of variables involved in capturing high-quality aerial footage, especially within a limited period of time.

We also discovered how much work is usually involved in mapping real-world, aerial location data into VR content to create an impactful experience.

What's next for FLYBIRD VR

The future of Fly Bird VR includes expanding to other cities, enhancing potential gamification elements, and incorporating more interactive and customizable features. We plan to explore more advanced VR technologies, potentially including AR features for an even more enriched user experience.

We're excited to see how the core technology could be extended to become even quicker and easier for companies / organizations to generate VR experiences for promotions or communication use cases without a high technical cost. Further partnerships with educational institutions and tourist boards are also on the horizon to broaden our reach and impact.

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