The new DJI Spark drone says it responds to hand gestures for flights. How easy is it to master? Jefferson Graham takes it out for a first flight to find out on #TalkingTech. Over the weekend, I took the DJI Spark out to the beach, performing a series of exercises to control the $499 device that made me look like I was either Jedi master or Tai Chi practitioner. With the force of my hand wave, I could control a digital device -- a magical feeling. Often, the Spark worked as advertised.

The new DJI Spark drone says it responds to hand gestures for flights. How easy is it to master? Jefferson Graham takes it out for a first flight to find out on #TalkingTech. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham thinks the new gesture controlled DJI Spark drone is the wave of the future in computing. Today, we move to the hands. In one of the most jaw-dropping tech demos of the year, drone manufacturer DJI this week showed off a new quadcopter that can be flown with hand gestures. Move your palm left to fly that way, extend your hand to land it. As someone who spends a lot of time flying drones and juggling with video-game like controllers to operate them, this is the holy grail. No more worries about connections and keeping my head down to operate--just wave my hands in the air and let the drone soar.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. With its sensing, mapping, and localization capabilities, the Google Tango platform has a lot of promise for robotics. Here's an update on some of what Google has been working on with it: And here's the talk that Johnny Lee from the Tango project gave at Google I/O earlier this month.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham thinks the new gesture controlled DJI Spark drone is the wave of the future in computing. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham thinks the new gesture controlled DJI Spark drone is the wave of the future in computing.

When I worked at Popular Photography (RIP), part of my job was to review drones. I understood what made a drone desirable and what features were cool enough to notice, but I never got good at flying them. I crashed one into a picnic table and literally flew one off of a cliff, where it lost GPS contact and flew off over the wilds of upstate New York bound (I think?) for Canada. And while these unmanned crafts have come a long way since their humble and wobbly beginnings, they can still be a pain to set up and fly. The category leader DJI is hoping its new "palm-sized" drone called the Spark can change that.