A drone zips across a digital obstacle course, weaving in and out of a metal bridge structure before crossing the finish line. A crowd roars to life, hooting and hollering as the pilot clutches the heat win. Fans then check an app on their phones to see how their picks stacked up.
The Drone Racing League simulator tryouts, held earlier this month at the HyperX Esports Arena in Las Vegas, added extra engagement for spectators using an app called Hydra FPV that enabled fans to wager points on winner outcomes.
The DRL is a racing league comprised of first person view drones and real world obstacle courses. The sport sits squarely between the categorizations of esports and action sports (something SportTechie helped coin as “vsports” last year). But the league has additionally built a simulator—a sophisticated video game—that mimics actual drone racing so well that it can host global tryouts in a round robin-style esports elimination tournament.
Hundreds of pilots attempted to be crowned the winner in exchange for a $75,000 drone racing contract to participate in the 2019 DRL Allianz World Championship. Pilots flew the same digital course all day, which might have gotten repetitive for fans if it weren’t for Hydra FPV. Those playing along had a heightened level of interest in the event because they had skin in the game.
The gamification of the sport and other digital enhancements that make races easier to follow (the DRL also color codes the drones to match the pilot stations), are broadening the appeal of this emerging sport. Drone racing is aspiring to gain some of the fame that esports and Formula E have.
“We love what Hydra FPV is doing and the innovation they’re bringing to the gamification of professional drone racing,” said DRL CEO and Founder Nicholas Horbaczewski, who played along on the app during the tryouts. “At our 2019 Swatch DRL Tryouts earlier this month in Las Vegas, it was amazing to see tons of fans onsite and offsite engaging with our DRL SIM tournament through Hydra—people are using apps like theirs to play fantasy drone racing, which is awesome.”
Marty Wetherall, the chief executive and co-founder of Hydra FPV, said the fantasy experience caught on during the DRL simulator tryouts and the MultiGP Championship—a real world competition using five-inch racing quads held the day before the DRL tryouts in Las Vegas—with “the majority of people” who were watching in person also “playing along and watching longer” as a result of the app.
“It’s hard to know for sure how many were watching across the different streaming platforms, but among people who began playing along in our Hydra FPV app during the Top 16 double-elimination final bracket of the MultiGP Championship on Saturday, Feb. 9, a whopping 76 percent played through to the very end,” he said. “That’s a 100-minute engagement with 76 percent retention. This data represents the first significant sign of stickiness for a sport that’s struggled to live up to its hype, and we’re not stopping until we’ve completely reinvented the drone racing fan experience.”
When a fan downloads the free-to-play Hydra FPV app, they’re greeted with a list of past, current and upcoming races. If the race has already finished, fans can see a list of top pilots (2019 DRL winner Chris ‘Phluxy’ Spangler tops the list if you click on the Swatch SIM DRL Tryouts event), and also top fans by points accumulated. If the race is current, fans can wager points on who they think will place. Based on how many picks they get correct, they’re rewarded points, increasing or decreasing their standing on a leaderboard. Fans who score the highest during specific rounds, or overall, win prizes.
Perhaps this was no more as evident than at the MultiGP event, which was comprised much more heavily of pilots than spectators. Even during practice rounds at the outdoor MultiGP event, pilots were cheering and reacting to race outcomes based on their picks via the Hydra app. Previously, a race like that would have been comparatively quiet as pilots only casually paid attention between their races.
“It really did elevate the intensity of the whole event,” said Spangler, who goes by his drone racing handle Phluxy. “I do think that the Hydra app brings a whole new level of interaction within the racing community. Before you wouldn’t really have any interest in what was happening in races that you weren’t a part of, whereas now the pilots all have a reason to get excited to watch every race because they are betting on them. I believe that it also applies to the spectators, whereas before they would only care to watch their favorite pilot, now they have a reason to be interested in every race.”
The Drone Racing League has an impetus to help mainstream the sport because of its relevance in the industry. It has already embraced color coding (streams of LED lights follow each drone as they whip around the course, making them easier to follow), and various levels of streaming and post-production video. The league’s use of Hydra FPV as an unofficial gamification partner marks another step forward.
As for Hydra, Wetherall said the company has ambitious expansion plans, including eventually incorporating the streams of the various events it covers directly into the app so that fans can watch and play along in the same place. It has also built baseball card-like profiles of drone pilots, accessible via the app, which help fans get to know the pilots they’re watching. For the pioneers of drone racing, it’s all about creating that stickiness so that fans have a reason to watch and to keep coming back for more.
“No one has brought this to the sport before and the sport has not caught on as much as lot of people thought it would in the early days because it hasn’t been as engaging as people thought it would be,”Wetherall said. “But we’ve been adding this rooting interest and we’ve seen amazing results.”