Commonplace Book

Thinkin' about telemetry and the aesthetics of the video overlay, particularly in FPV flying videos, but also as a look that goes farther back, to fighter-jets and (more powerfully) the portrayal of HUD tech in films.

Sidenote, lol, I implemented this writefreely website and loved the idea that it can't show images, but for this little sortie I wish I could show some pics – both of my own recent tests with minimOSD and analog drone cameras and of older canonical versions of the form. Too bad!

In FPV videos found on YouTube, I'm really taken by the live-ness of the image (including the overlay, which is deliciously vulnerable to the same interference as the initial analog signal – very different from the PLAY/RECORD and date-code overlays of VCR and 90s film-camera overlays). This vulnerability definitely plays into my love of liveness, live video in general – the forensic “proof” that the feed is not cut, altered, or otherwise mediated-in-time (although staging the whole affair being videoed is fair game, fertile ground!).

The presence of an overlay of real-time contextual data carries with it a bunch of implications: that the viewer “needs” to see the overlaid information as much as they need to see the video feed; that there exists a companion process/computer/entity that is creating this information contemporaneously but not necessarily nearby; that the feed's content will change in ways that correspond to changes in the video (but not necessarily directly, like the histogram or other diagnostic overlays of a DSLR viewfinder).

In the FPV community, it's often the case that the analog feed-and-OSD (I'll say OSD, On Screen Display, for the rest of this writing – it is the same as overlay) isn't the ultimate media collateral: the drone will also be carrying a “better” GoPro or other hi-res action camera whose footage is the actual deliverable of the flight, leaving the analog feed as a tool-for-the-maker, the cartoon before the paint. This lower status given to the OSD makes it an interesting site of private pragmatism, a place where all sorts of data are allowed to crowd the image, since the video feed needs only to be good enough to navigate with. Analog's low latency makes it durably popular even as digital video transmission gets better and better, and interestingly, to the “good enough to navigate with” remark, some digital transmission schemes designed specifically for FPV flying will privilege the preservation of detail at the center of the screen, allowing the edges to blur and chunk in a form of tunnel vision, aimed at keeping the pilot's path as low-latency and detailed as possible amid deteriorating transmission quality.

There's a beautiful intensity to lots of FPV footage – not just in the frenetic action on the video feed, but in the data whizzing by, and the visible degradation of the analog signal as distance-from-home grows greater and battery power dwindles. It's so limited in such fundamental ways – time in flight, space onscreen to display critical context, line-of-sight from home.

The opposite of an FPV “freestyle” run is a drone bombing – terminal guidance to a remote target. The screen's dissolution to static after final approach indicates a successful, even glorious, death of the transmitter. I say this now only to palpate the other edges of this visual realm; I'm not too interested in the glory of hurting people, but it's there in our cultural context as we watch any sort of drone footage nowadays. In fact, the terminal-guidance shot precedes any joyride/freestyle forms – the nightvision telemetry videos of laser-guided ordinance from the first Iraqi invasion; the HUD videos of various dogfights in film and news features, etc. The original analog-with-overlay version of airborne video is part and parcel of news-safe, 20th century forms of death.

So when we watch these giddy, weightless bando runs (FPV slang for joyrides round abandoned architecture), we're keenly aware of the system's, and our own, mortality – indeed, the OSD exists in order to help the pilot (and us, by projection) more expertly dance along the razor edge between an exhilarating sortie and snow-screen disaster.

What I'm working on now is ways to expand the context of the OSD layer – to augment the autopilot's telemetry stream and allow a more poetic, emotional form of address to take place alongside the critical sensor information. When flying FPV, the operator is in an extreme position: an absolutely engaged video-watcher, shutting out the immediate world in favor of a goggles-on, out-of-body avatarization in which they become the quadcopter. In this sort of cybernetic projection, the OSD layer is an unusually readable augmentation (fighter pilots wear more elaborate interfaces, like a tongue-based electrovoltaic device that helps them orient relative to the surface of the Earth).

I see in this moment of total and essential focus-on-the-image a moment ripe for me to speak with the sort of candor and urgency that precludes social niceties, and short-circuits the elaborate and overwrought prose I fall back on when I am trying to be honest about something important, like how close we could be, or what heartbeats are for.