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The Most Bitchin' Drone Videos From Seven Continents

Because you're too broke to go on a soul-searching globetrot, we mined Travel by Drone, a crowdsourced map of hobbyist drone footage, for the hits.
A giraffe chillin' in the Serengeti. Screengrab: Will Burrard-Lucas.

Want to go on that soul-searching globetrot you've always dreamt of taking, but too broke to make it happen? It's OK. Travel By Drone has you covered.

In case you missed it, there's recently been quite a bit of chatter about the interactive map. The idea is brilliantly simple: Give small-fry drone hobbyists from around the world a chance to showcase geospecific flight footage. As far as I can tell, Travel By Drone is the first such crowdsourced project of its kind.

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According to the site's About page, the only parameters are that YouTube submissions be taken by (not of) drones that are flown outside, are neither militarized nor promotional (so, no product, political, religious, personal hype), and are "of good quality," offering clear views of wherever the footage was taken. If a video meets those criteria, it'll be up for approval by TBD's dedicated team. Once approved, it'll be pinned to a Google Map. To think, "backpacking through Europe" is now as easy as searching the town or region of your liking, clicking on the corresponding orange pin, sitting back, and taking in the view from the comfort of your desk.

It's a nifty site. Think of it as Radio Aporee, the user-generated map of what every place on Earth sounds like, only with motion sickness, castle porn, and womp-y dubstep (easily drone pilots' preferred background music of choice). In a moment when both off-the-shelf drone tech and virtual tourism are revolutionizing how we see and experience the world, you have to wonder how something like TBD didn't already exist.

More and more approved videos are flooding in by the day—you can see the latest entries along the right rail—and the map also seems to be getting slammed with traffic at the moment, which likely explains why the zoom and drag features are a bit slow to respond. This makes navigating hundreds of site-specific drone videos is still pretty overwhelming. So I've gone ahead and pulled the most bitchin uploads from each of the seven continents. Ready?

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AFRICA (via)

ANTARCTICA (via)

ASIA / Kuwait (via)

AUSTRALIA (ft. JetSkis) (via)

EUROPE / France (via)

NORTH AMERICA / Les Iles de la Madeleine (via)

SOUTH AMERICA / Chile (via)

It's important to note the stakes here. A good deal of the flight videos currently pinned on TBD likely came at considerable risk, be it legal or bodily or otherwise, to those who flew their drones. (That's to say nothing of the economic barriers to entry; surely there are untold millions of would-be hobbyist droners across the seven continents who simply don't have the money to shell out on a cool camera-equipped RC toy.)

Indeed, there are still more places where small-fry drones can't fly than there are places where they can. A few gaping blank spots, namely the northern regions of Africa and South America, most of Russia, and all of North Korea, bear no pins. At least not yet, they don't.

Travel By Drone is not just a clearinghouse for bitchin' aerial videos, then. In the long run, as more and more pins pop up around the world, the map will serve as a sort of unofficial barometer of drone fear, availability, and legality.

In the meantime, it's the next best thing to embarking on the transcontinental vision quest of your dreams.