Today we’re happy to announce the latest updates on our flagship product – Sense 1, the world’s first intelligent tracking controller for your gimbals. It’s been through a ton of changes, re-designs and improvements, but the Sense 1 is now ready to start testing on set. We’ve been working some fantastic filmmakers to bring this product to market and I want to share some of the latest demo videos and images here. We’ve built the Sense 1 to work with most popular professional rigs, go-pro scale drones and hand-held gimbals. You can find a full list of supported devices on our Tech Specs Page and if you’re device is not on the list you can also reach out us through our Contact Page.
A Bold New Mission
Welcome to Vertical and thanks for checking out our blog ! If you’ve been following us closely so far you may have noticed that we recently re-branded from Perceptive Labs to Vertical. Firstly, we can’t thank you enough for your support and secondly, after working on turning our vision into reality for the past year and learning a lot along the way, we decided it was time to upgrade The rest of this post is all about that journey. Let’s dive in.
Perceptive Labs began in July 2014 in a robotics lab at the University of Waterloo with a simple goal – A quest for the perfect aerial shot. After a rather large number of embarrassing attempts to film a giant robot with a tiny drone, we realized two things. 1) we really sucked at flying and 2) we were really unsatisfied with all the aerial filming products out there. Professional drones offered great creative control but were unnecessarily complicated. Consumer drones were pretty easy to fly if you wanted to film simple aerial shots but as soon you tried something more complex, it was close to impossible to synchronize flying and camera control in a satisfying way. Auto-follow drones were great if all you wanted was to bike down an empty road in a wide open field. We were baffled. Why couldn’t we have it all? Why couldn’t there be a product that gave us all the creative control with none of the complexity? There had to be a better way.
We explored everything we could learn about the art. We found that the most amazing aerial shots were in fact aggressive close-up shots of subjects, perfectly framed in the shot. As it turns out, it’s incredibly hard to keep a flying camera framed on a single subject for more than a few seconds without messing up the shot. The problem is even worse when your subject is moving. Most aerial videos we saw were quick successions of cuts not longer than a few seconds because of just how hard it was to keep the camera pointed at what you wanted to film. Of course there are a lot of more features that could turn drones into powerful filming tools but we realized that we could have the biggest impact on aerial filming by first inventing a better way to just keep your camera framed on moving subjects in a simple and intuitive way. And that’s exactly what we built. The Perceptive SHIFT was the first add-on module for drones that could plug into any drone and enable auto-tracking of subjects using nothing but your camera and a truck load of software. Unlike any other tracking product, we decided to build a radically new machine vision system that could give any drone eyes and a mind of its own. Your drone could now see the world around it, learn what you wanted to film and help you film the most amazing aerial shots you’ve ever filmed without breaking a sweat.
We received an outpouring of support from the community and we thank you for that. Hundreds of people reached out to us with new ideas on how to make the experience of filming more enjoyable and creative than it had ever been before. We met some of the most amazing names in film and flew
with some of best pilots in the business. Along the way we were lucky enough to get the support of partners like Velocity, Y-Combination, the Creative Destruction Lab and the Canadian Film Center and amazing Investors like Version One Ventures and Eleven Two Capital who each had a unique and measurable impact on our story. Through hundreds of conversations and enriching experiences our vision grew larger we made it our singular goal to break all barriers to creative expression and empower people to tell their stories in new and interesting ways, one step at a time.
Today, our team has grown to a band of six insanely talented people, each amazing in their own way. We’re on a mission to push the limits of drone technology beyond anyone's expectations and unleash true freedom in storytelling through innovations in software. As it turns out, drones are becoming increasingly relevant in a huge number of applications and hyper-intelligence is a problem that, once solved, can unlock incredible new options to leverage drones in ways we’ve never imagined. That is our mission and our reason for being.
We’ve decided to re-brand ourselves to Vertical to really find a single word that could encompass our audacious goals and our unique approach to achieving them. We’re moving upwards, onward and in the pursuit of aerial technology that can change the way we experience the world around us. In short, we’re vertically inspired, and we invite you to join us on this journey. Let’s break barriers together.
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Awesome creation of intelligent tracking controller its really works in lot of place...
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