PowerVision PowerRay: Underwater drones are simply more fun
Flying drones. That can be quite exhausting, because one wrong move and the thing crashes. Moment of panic. Possible damage to property. A bit unfavourable. Team IFA finds the underwater drone from PowerVision more relaxing and, above all, more fun.
"Here, can you take this for a second," a woman with one arm in a sling asks me and presses a remote control into my hand. She introduces herself as Malin Lundsten, Marketing Manager at PowerVision. The Swedish woman, who lives in Finland, has been injured in a cycling accident and has to replace batteries in the remote control with one arm in a sling. As this has to be done quickly at the IFA in Berlin, accidental observers of her drones have to act as helpers. Video producer Stephanie Tresch and I actually wanted to observe the PowerEgg, an egg-shaped flying drone, and possibly make a short video about it.
The batteries are changed and Malin walks away from the flying drones. We look after her, the way you might look after someone and think "that was a bit of a strange encounter". She heads towards a water tank, in which a white and black object is floating around somewhat awkwardly. Interesting.
We follow Malin. "That's the PowerRay," she tells us. In English, but I'll translate it for the sake of simplicity. The PowerRay is a new kind of drone. Someone might have thought of it earlier, maybe they are, but this is the first time Stephanie and I have seen an underwater drone.
For fishermen and divers who don't want to drown
The U-Drone - we'll call it that for now - is a lot of fun. Three motors allow the pilot to dive to depths of up to 30 metres. With the built-in sonar, the drone can see down to a depth of 70 metres. Sonar. In a drone. As a child of Lake Constance, I'm thrilled and am bloching around with the drone in the tank.
At the front end, you can cast a lure to help you fish. To see what's swimming around the bait, the PowerRay can stream live at up to 1080p and record at 4k. Built-in spotlights at the front also help in murky water or at night.
The PowerRay is always connected to the water surface with a cable. To prevent you from losing the PowerRay in the depths or if it gets tangled up somewhere down there, the cable can be disconnected from the drone at the touch of a button. This triggers an automatic mode that allows the drone to float to the surface. At most, the cable is lost, but not the drone.
Then Malin tells us how she once killed a PowerRay. "That was very early on in development," she says. She was given an early prototype and was then allowed to drive it around in a lake. "Somehow I managed to wrap the cable around a steel cable of the bridge I was standing on." Wouldn't actually be a problem, except that the cable seal was not yet waterproof in the alpha version. "Then the PowerRay was dead," she laughs. She catches herself again, back to the marketing-suitable on-message talk. "Of course it's been fixed now."
Meeting Malin is refreshing, as many of the men and women at the IFA stands stay on message all day, just talking about the product and pitching its USPs and synergies and ecosystems and whatnot. So kudos to Malin, who just humanely turned two cynical journalists into fans of the PowerRay.
The app that is so silly
You can control the PowerRay in three ways. You can use the app, of course, but according to Malin this is by far the least cool way to control the device. Then via VR glasses. To make them waterproof, PowerVision has teamed up with lens manufacturer Zeiss so that you can swim around like a fish. It's quite nice, if a little dizzy. The coolest feature is definitely the remote control, which uses two joysticks to control all directions of the PowerRay. Place the PowerRay's camera feed on a nearby television and it looks like a scene from SeaQuest. Yes, I still remember the 1990s series with a submarine.
I can do even better. I used to love watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as a kid. I'm telling you. Lake Constance kid.
In short: the PowerRay is definitely a lot of fun. Both on the stand and in open water, because the cameras deliver razor-sharp images of the underwater world. And by the way, you don't have to wait until your Caribbean holiday to buy a PowerRay. I can tell you from experience that the underwater world at home is also absolutely beautiful.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.