Researchers find people aren’t scared of small drones (at least those that look like fairies)
There’s a very interesting new research paper from Texas A&M, who studied public reactions to small UAVs after the university did a performance of Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night Dream with drones (an AirRobot AR-100 quadcopter and some little Blade RC helis) at the fairies. Smithsonian Magazine reports:
Brittany A. Duncan, a doctoral candidate at the university, and her faculty adviser, a professor of computer science and engineering named Robin R. Murphy, were on the team providing technical support for the micro-helicopters and the AirRobot quadcopter-style drone that were used to represent Shakespeare’s fairies. In rehearsals, the actors tended to behave as if the AirRobot—roughly the diameter of a large pizza, with four exposed rotors—were as safe as the fist-size micro-helicopters. So Murphy urged them to think of the AirRobot as “the flying weedwacker of death.” But when audiences also displayed a high level of comfort, she began to wonder whether small drones “are just not scary to people.”
Full Story: DIYDrones
Hunter-seekers in Dune are small drones.