Drone Racing Goes Professional With the Launch of the Drone Racing League
Star Wars’ pod racing meets modern-day technology.
While drone racing, or FPV (first-person view) racing as it is known among insiders, has been the purview of dedicated underground hobbyists since its inception, a new company hopes to bring the burgeoning sport into the mainstream with the establishment of the Drone Racing League (DRL). Releasing a first batch of promotional videos on YouTube, DRL has revealed the premise of the league, which will involve closed circuits in empty stadiums and abandoned malls, which are outfitted with bright neon markers to mark checkpoints and point the drones in the right direction, while dry ice fog is pumped in to up the cyberpunk-esque atmosphere.
As the technology for streaming high-quality video from the drones to viewers is not yet there, DRL has instead opted to forgo live events for professionally edited episodes of each race released after the fact for TV, Internet, and VR-based viewing platforms. Having secured over $8 million USD in venture capital, DRL hopes to take drone racing to new heights with mainstream distribution, and with millions of views on existing drone racing videos on the Internet, it’s no far stretch to think that this might have a shot at greatness.
Watch more videos introducing DRL online here.
