NYC

Sit back, relax and grab a cold one, because you're about to take an aerial tour of the Serengeti, courtesy of that flying drone you're staring at. Developed by Microdrones, this MD4-100 quadrotor was recently sent off to Kenya, where it gathered footage for a TV nature documentary produced by TBS Japan. By hovering over the terrain, the craft was able to get relatively up close and personal with zebras, elephants and other wildlife, without creating the same kind of disturbance that heavy duty, camera-laden trucks can wreak. Presumably, that's because the animals have no idea what to make of a flying robot, though part of us wants to believe there's some sort of full-circle, techno-evolutionary dynamic at work here, momentously bringing bot and beast together in some sort of pre-apocalyptic symbiosis. But that's just us. Hover past the break to see the video for yourself. IEEE Spectrum microdronesGMBH (YouTube)

Assuming you own a Sensefly Swinglet CAM or some other high-res camera-equipped UAV, you could be just minutes away from turning your plain old 2D aerial photos into comprehensive 3D maps. Pix4D, a new software program coming out of EPFL -- the same institute that brought us this race of altruistic robots -- takes images shot using an aerial drone to render 3D maps in the cloud in just 30 minutes. Users upload images taken with their flying machines, at which point Pix4D kicks into action, defining high contrast points in the phots and pasting them together based on those points. It then renders a 3D model, overlays the graphics, and spits out a Google Earth-style map. So what's with this 4D business? Well, its developers claim that users can easily see the progression of any model by deploying their Sensefly drone whenever they see fit, throwing the added layer of time into the mix. You can see the fruits of Pix4D's labor in the video after the break. ...