The Sport of the Future Has Arrived: Droneboarding
Now just add a drone. Ivan Sekretarev/AP
It’s sort of like kitesurfing or wakeboarding, but for the 21st century.
Forget racing drones, or fighting drones: The sport of the future is strapping yourself onto a snowboard, and being dragged around by drone. It’s sort of like kitesurfing or wakeboarding, but for the 21st century.
A video that’s given rise to the “droneboarding” nickname, surfaced by The Verge, shows a boy in Russia being dragged through the snow by a quadcopter. It’s not quite the extreme action you’d expect—presumably the little drone doesn’t have the power to pull the child any faster—but if you attached yourself to something bigger, perhaps something with a top speed of 86 mph, you might be in for a wild ride. It’d be a great—albeit probably not very safe—way to enjoy all the drones that were received as Christmas presents while winter continues to dump snow on the Northern hemisphere.
As Popular Science pointed out, last year was the year of the hoverboard—perhaps this year, teens and celebrities around the world will be Instagramming themselves slowly getting dragged around by their pet drones. And considering how explosively unsafe hoverboards proved to be last year, droneboarding might actually be a bit of an upgrade.