Each team contains three members: a pilot, a spotter, and a director. The pilots wear virtual reality goggles to provide them the feeling of flying with the drone. That eliminates any potential for situational awareness of what is happening around the drone, so the spotter is on hand to ensure that the pilot is informed of any potential hazards.
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Something that viewers at home notice is the whine of the drones’ rotors in flight. Exarchos addressed that in his discussion. “I know that there's a question around audio and the noise that this equipment generates, which is a reasonable question,” he said. The OBS team has 1800 microphones placed around the Olympic venues in support of their 860 cameras, so the service has the ability to switch to different audio sources.
They rely on microphones on the drones to provide ambient sound, but in the process, they also pick up the noise of the drones’ rotors. The athletes don’t notice the sound because the drone is behind them, but viewers hear it.
Noise-cancellation technology would seem purpose-built for this application, but Exarchos said that it just isn’t good enough at the moment. “I think that through the years, this noise, with technology, will be reduced,” he said. “I believe that also with AI, it will be at some point possible to reduce the capture of this noise from the microphones. But currently, if we did that, we would kill a lot of the other atmosphere that we capture in the venues, and we simply don't want to do that.”
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