Constellation - a Multi-User Interface for Remote Drone Tours.

Remotely controlled camera drones can support live, dynamic, and interactive virtual tours for travelers to overcome distance, expense, and health barriers. Yet, assigning one drone to one traveler may incur unnecessary waste of resources, and an abundance of concurrent drones raises safety concerns. While sharing the input and output of a single drone among multiple concurrent users can alleviate these limitations, standard control sharing protocols, such as turn-taking, are often inefficient. We present Constellation, a multi-user drone control system that synthesizes diverse user goals and generates efficient flight paths for the group. It supports point-of-interest specification on both static 3D environmental maps and live camera views. The generated paths minimize all users’ total extra waiting time. A web-based study with 16 participants show that Constellation could help groups navigate to their points-of-interest faster in comparison to the turn-taking baseline.