We are extremely happy to have been invited to attend the first RISE conference in Hong Kong, where over 500 inspiring startups from all over Asia came to present their ideas to established technology companies and venture capital firms from all over the world. Among the attending companies were Amazon, Google, Automattic and Stripe from the U.S., while the Chinese and Asian attendees included SoftBank, Sequoia Capital China, OnePlus, LINE, and of course DJI.
Representing DJI at the conference was Andy Pan, Vice President of Ecosystems, and Romeo Durscher, our Director of Education.
Pan demonstrated the importance of our recently launched SDK (Software Development Kit), not only to foster relationships between DJI and developers, but also to give commercial UAV users the ability to innovate and create their own custom aerial systems based on our Matrice 100 platform and our Guidance navigation system. Already, we’ve seen UAVs adapted by industries as diverse as mining, agriculture, civil engineering and architecture.
To help demonstrate what’s possible to create with the SDK, we had invited our friends from Spark Aerial to showcase one of their amazing feats of engineering. What they’ve done is nothing less than build an application that connects our Inspire 1 to a set of VR goggles, letting you see the live camera stream from the aircraft and even control its flight through your head movements.
In addition to the VR demo, Radley Angelo from Spark Aerial and our own Romeo Durscher worked together to show the abilities of the Guidance when paired with the Matrice 100. Flying on stage, the Matrice 100 was easily able to sense and avoid obstacles. Its capabilities were further shown when it stopped dead in its tracks when Romeo walked up and put his arm up in the air in front of the aircraft.
Following our first-day presentation on the Main Stage, we answered questions from a number of journalistic outlets, including BBC Asia and Reuters. Then, we took part in a roundtable discussion titled Drones in Industry where we were again joined by Spark Aerial and another of our SDK partners, DroneDeploy. During the hour-long discussion, we shared our thoughts and insights on where the drone industry is headed and how industries are currently and can in the future leverage this technology.
During the conference’s second day, Romeo again took the stage on our behalf. First, he showed the video from the Son Doong cave, the world’s largest, that was jointly explored and recorded by DJI and ABC for their Good Morning America show. The presentation was a great way of showing the Phantom 3 and Inspire 1 in action as they made their way through this massive system of caves.
Our last event of the conference was a discussion with DroneDeploy who showed how their custom app transforms DJI products to complete 3D mapping solutions. With this app, an off-the-shelf Phantom 3 or Inspire 1 can produce 3D maps within minutes of capturing the images. No additional hardware is needed, and very little training and experience is required. That is how powerful our products become when paired with purpose-built mobile applications.
All in all, we greatly enjoyed participating in the RISE conference. It allowed us to make people think, to inspire them to learn more about the possibilities of UAVs and connect with others with an interest in this technology and build new friendships for the future.
