http://www.youtube.com/embed/13BahrdkMU8?feature=player_embedded

That's even more shocking than you could imagine, films make it look unbelievable and that takes it a step further, real Enemy of the State type stuff.

The impact of this is merely that less resources are required... this thing could allow a whole bunch of operators to view different areas which would have otherwise required several drones. Downside is that the resolution seems to be a bit poor... though I guess that is the compromise for covering such a huge area at once. I remember escorting a random vehicle into basra in the middle of the night back in 2004... we asked the guy what it was carrying - he said 'a balloon' we were like 'ok mate... tosser' though sure enough, the next day, on a patrol during the day time we see this big balloon thing up in the air above the city... turned out it could withstand a few thousand AK47 rounds and was capable of reading a number plate from several kilometers (no doubt the resolution would have been substantially better than that thing in the link though the field of view likely substantially less)

Would have thought though that if it flew at a lower altitude the resolution would be better. They were just demonstrating the area coverage surely?

Question is, would you be for or against something like this being in operation in the UK 24/7 everywhere? On the one hand it'd help insurance cases, court cases etc, any kidnappings etc would be solvable, just use the tracking from the time last seen.

Then again, a lot of your personal freedoms would be out the window too...

This isn't exactly ceiling cat is watching you masturbate, personal freedoms are unaffected as at best they can see where you go, who you interact with on the street and what buildings you go into. It's for general surveillance/tracking, CCTV has more impact on personal freedoms and typically all that does is capture crime on film (like innocent girls getting knifed on buses). This is a good thing. The day there's a drone hovering outside your bedroom window is the day to be worried.

I've just seen my best friends wife go into the house of my other friend. Now they're in the back garden clearly doing some strenuous activity.

No personal freedoms infringed? I'd argue that CCTV with its narrow field of view and it's clearly defined purpose is less infringing than Argus.

That said I love tech and I love the idea of this. You can guarantee that the camera is more capable than they cover in that movie.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

There is quite a bit of consternation about this and privately available RPVs that might be used to spy on citizens by government officials, companies and individuals. This has reached the point of some threats being made to shoot them down.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729066.200-backlash-against-civilian-drones-begins.html

What a ridiculous amount of storage.

Quote from: addictweb on March 20, 2013, 17:04:32 PM
What a ridiculous amount of storage.

1000tb per day = 41tb/hour

anyone know what kind of system they'll use for that kind of storage? even if they dump most of the footage, there'll be times when they'll want to be able to store a few weeks worth... like after a terrorist attack ?

Quote from: knighty on March 20, 2013, 17:18:28 PM

Quote from: addictweb on March 20, 2013, 17:04:32 PM
What a ridiculous amount of storage.

1000tb per day = 41tb/hour

anyone know what kind of system they'll use for that kind of storage? even if they dump most of the footage, there'll be times when they'll want to be able to store a few weeks worth... like after a terrorist attack ?

SAN. It'll be backhauled to some SAN solution in a datacentre somewhere.

I've worked on kit thats had multiple 10s of petabytes of storage but cheaply via SATA.

What would be more interesting is how they send 41tb an hour of data wirelessly from the drone, that's a hell of a throughput for RF.

Quote from: zpyder on March 20, 2013, 12:35:47 PM
Would have thought though that if it flew at a lower altitude the resolution would be better. They were just demonstrating the area coverage surely?

Well yes moving the lens (or is it multiple lenses and some sort of combined feed form the all - they weren't clear) closer would do that - but I'd suspect that the whole point of this in the first place is to cover a large area... also they don't want to increase the risk of the thing being shot down.

I'm sure there are plenty of other drones out there if they need high resolution images/video of specific areas from a similar height.

Put it this way they've been using light aircraft etc.. for surveillance in places like Northern Ireland for decades - there would have been cameras with a higher resolution than that thing back in the 80s... though the area this thing can observe at once and the capability of zooming in and monitoring several bits of that area simultaneously is pretty cool - the automatic tracking of vehicles etc.. is cool too . Suppose you've got a rogue state with chemical weapons or nukes at a bunch of certain known sites you might be interested in automatically tracking any vehicles coming out of those sites. I'd guess the whole scud hunting episode of the 1st gulf war could have been made so much easier with something like this.

On the subject of throughput by my quick estimates thats 683GB/min or 11GB/sec, pretty staggering if they are really transmitting that wirelessly in some fashion.