See Straight Through Walls by Augmenting Your Eyeballs With Drones

Robots make fantastic remote-sensing systems, ideal for sending in to disaster areas or for search-and-rescue. Drones in particular can move rapidly over large areas or through structures, identifying damage or looking for survivors by sending a video feed from their on-board cameras to a remote operator. While the data that drones provide can be invaluable, managing them can be quite difficult, especially once they get beyond line-of-sight. Researchers from Graz University of Technology, in Styria, Austria, led by Okan Erat, want to change the way we interface with drones, using augmented reality to turn them from complicated flying robots into remote cameras that an untrained user can easily control. Through a HoloLens--Microsoft's mixed reality head-mounted display--a drone can enable a sort of X-ray vision, allowing you to see straight through walls and making controlling the drone as easy as grabbing a virtual drone and putting it exactly where you want it to be.