Lost in the crowd: Yuneec Breeze VR Review

Yuneec wants you to wear a 2 lb plastic bucket while selfie flying.

Some ideas are best left on the drawing board. And as this Yuneec Breeze VR Review explains, that includes wearing a 2 lb plastic encased virtual reality screen on your head while operating a camera drone with a battery life of about a dozen minutes.

The initial Yuneec Breeze VR Review for this “selfie” drone is mixed, with the item reaching a handful of distributors and some brave outlets taking orders. The main complaints center on the stability of the camera in streaming 4K video – the short answer is to avoid this and move to 1080p – and the value for money in the US$500 price tag.

We’ll look at those features in a minute in this Yuneec Breeze VR Review, but reports suggest Yuneec has now moved beyond the initial use of the SkyView FPV headset from the Typhoon H and Tornado H920 models to the Breeze.

That adds a whopping US$250 for the complete set, taking the Yuneec drone out of the realm of plug-and-ply to take some quick aerial snapshots on a sunny day to a price well above the more robust and feature-laden DJI Phantom 3 Standard with proprietary Lightbridge 2 technology for solid communications.

So for $750 what would the targeted first-time drone buyer get?

A beetle-shaped drone that weighs half a pound and is about the size of a large cream puff with a camera that has a review swivel advertised at 90 degrees, but which a Yuneec Breeze VR Review suggests is closer to 75 degrees.

This will be tethered by a cable between a smartphone or tablet to the VR headset that has a 5-inch, 720p display with a 75.5-degree field of view, a bit shy of direct competitors that offer 110-degree fields of view.

The Yuneec R&D team needs to review internal specs a bit closer.

In any event, that means three battery-operated pieces of equipment, the Yuneec Breeze, your own smartphone and the SkyView, operating in sync over a 12-minute optimum battery cycle. According to a Yuneec Breeze VR Review, this configuration would deliver not mechanically stabilized 4K video, which early reviewers suggest is choppy. As mentioned in the Yuneec Breeze VR Review, most users instead select electronically stabilized feeds at 1080p.

Of course the fun starts if you are walking around with the headset and operating all three gadgets. One Yuneec Breeze VR Review on Amazon described the SkyView as made of “cheap materials” and labelled “uncomfortable, and the light gets inside.” “NOT for multi-focal wearers.”

But the real problems may start because of the limited connection range for the Breeze to the WiFi connection on the smartphone or tablet – about 80 meters. If the connection drops, as mentioned in a Yuneec Breeze VR Review, tearing off the headset and gaining line of sight could be crucial. Though the drone has internal positioning sensors, performance has been described as uneven in the Yuneec Breeze VR Review.

That would also mean severing the cable tether from the headset to the controller. So a drone pilot would need to readjust focus to more intense light conditions quickly on a phone screen that in most cases would lack a hood to cut glare.

Based on this Yuneec Breeze VR Review, it’s hard to see how a solo flyer would pull off all of these mechanics and at the very least some safety protocols would need to be worked out in advance with a second person available to jump in should the Yuneec drone attempt a flyaway or looks set to crash to earth.

Finally, the Yuneec Breeze VR Review shows that Yuneec appears to have made the SkyView proprietary to the Yuneec drone APP and controller, which in a comparison of DJI vs Yuneec shows that DJI models can use a variety of VR headsets with all DJI Phantom models and the Inspire 1 – with pilots often buying units second-hand at low cost on eBay.

So here’s some free advice for Yuneec. Keep this idea on the drawing board.

 

 

 

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