Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s an unmanned aerial vehicle

I stood in the corner of the small office as a remote-controlled quadcopter hovered a metre in front of me. No larger than a small pizza box, it moved from side to side, the four rotors loudly stirring the air, as its owner piloted the device beside me. On a screen next to us was a monitor displaying live footage of my face produced by the quadcopter’s camera. As the fast-moving blades spun ever closer to my body, I watched myself smile nervously on the screen.
“If something does fail – a motor goes out and it falls on a $100,000 dollar Land Rover – it will ruin your day,” said Long Chean. But the Phnom Penh-based videographer and owner of the Third World Studios production company has become an adept pilot, he assured me.
“I’ve had enough flight time that I’m more comfortable being near people,” he said.
“I used to be nervous [flying] around anything living. Or anything expensive.”
While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), colloquially known as drones, garner the most media attention for their use in combat over the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan, much smaller varieties have been put to civilian use, with Domino’s Pizza delivering the world’s first pizza order by drone last June. For Chean, UAVs allow him to shoot aerial photography that was once prohibitively expensive for his small media company.
“We can all shoot from the ground, and you can get an underwater camera, but it’s kind of cool that you can shoot from the air without paying an arm and a leg for a helicopter,” said Chean, who bought his first UAV six months ago.
Chean’s DJI Phantom drone, which is one of four models he owns, is capable of ascending hundreds of metres into the air at 21.6 kilometres per hour and cruises at top speeds of 36 kilometres per hour. Its battery life is around 12 minutes, and its maximum radius is 300 metres. With a retail price of $700, Chean said that it costs little compared to the UAVs sold five years ago, which ranged from $30,000 to $40,000.
His aerial photography includes private footage taken around the Kep coastline and Battambang, as well as commercial videos shot for clients, including NagaWorld and a Khmer horror movie production.

Sourced : The Phnom Penh Post