In 2017, Paper Airplanes Come With Drone Motors and VR Piloting

We've come a long way, baby

January 27, 2017 9:00 am

When you were a child, you spoke as a child, understood as a child and thought as a child.

But somewhere along the line you became a man, and you put away childish things (or most of them, anyhow).

Today, let’s put pride aside and revisit one: the paper airplane.

Using a Parrot-powered drone frame fitted with motors and a camera as a base, the PowerUp FPV is a three-oz., fold-it-yourself paper plane that can fly for 10 minutes at a time and hit up to 20 MPH.

The PowerUp’s camera is the key to its ingenious control system: once you pair your smartphone with a Google cardboard viewer, you can fly the plane from a virtual reality-style first-person POV. Tilt your head, mini aircraft goes left. Tilt right, it goes right. Stumble and fall over, plane goes kaput.

Paper Airplane Drone (2 images)

“We’re bringing today’s technology to where it all began — paper airplanes — to create something truly remarkable,” says PowerUp CEO Shai Goitein. “We’re giving imagination real wings, and letting people experience flight in a way they only dreamed about.”

Granted, we never really pondered what it’d be like to sit in the cockpit of a paper airplane before, but now that it’s a possibility, the concept doesn’t seem half bad — especially for $200.

Just watch out for paper cuts.

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