My brother was visibly nervous at the thought of flying the buzzing, expensive, 360-degree drone hovering in front of him—especially once I told him my drone kit sent to me for review cost $2,000. (There are cheaper bundles, but I’ll talk about pricing later.) His movements were slowed by winter cold as he took off his glove and gripped the Antigravity A1’s single-hand controller. I gave him a short rundown of how to fly, what buttons to hit, and slipped the A1’s bug-eyed headset over his eyes. I physically had to maneuver his fingers to the correct buttons. He couldn’t see his own hands while his view was filled with a global, 360-degree image streaming from the drone.
Despite his initial fumbling, in mere minutes, he was flying at top speed, abandoning all pretenses and enjoying what is likely the most unique drone we’ve seen in years. “Oh,” he sighed with his eyes still concealed behind the goggles and the exterior screen showing the Manhattan skyline in his field of view. “This is way easier than I thought it would be.”
Antigravity A1
Designed by Insta360, the 360 camera drone is easy to fly even if you’ll look goofy wearing the required headset. Professionals may get more or less use out of it depending on what they want.
- Easy to fly once you know how
- Headset is excessive in the best way
- 8K 360-degree footage from the air
- Solid obstacle avoidance
- Difficult to find controls inside headset
- 360 stitching isn’t great for close-up objects
- Some App issues
- Better batteries require spending more
- Requires charging everything individually
What I’m talking about is a drone that’s odd in every possible way. The Antigravity A1—designed by a company spun out from 360-degree camera maker Insta360—currently allows only one control option, a flight stick crossed with the sawed-off grip of a pistol. You don’t have to use any buttons to control the A1 (there are a few physical toggles for turning and elevation), but flying requires pointing in a direction, pulling the trigger, and letting the drone follow your lead. You don’t so much capture one image through the drone’s sensor but everything surrounding the cameras thanks to its 360 lenses. And you don’t so much see what the drone sees as much as you inhabit it through the goggles—like you’re standing in the middle of a transparent globe hovering several hundred meters above the ground.
Drones never stopped being interesting. Recent examples like the DJI Neo 2 and Mini 5 Pro are smaller and more capable than previous versions. Despite that, 2025 is an awkward time for stateside drone operators, as the most popular drone maker, DJI, is on the edge of being yanked out of the U.S. market entirely come Dec. 23. If you’ve never taken to the air with a zippy, unmanned aircraft system, the skies are still a wonder to navigate. Not only is the A1 an incredibly accessible flyer that will inevitably upset traditional drone pilots, but it’s also a whole new category for drones with its 360-degree cameras.
You’ll need to wear goggles
Yes, you’ll look weird flying the Antigravity A1, but that’s the point. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The A1 is not a cheap drone. It starts at $1,600 for the standard bundle, which includes the drone, headset, controller, and a single battery for flying. Opting for the $1,900 Explorer bundle will get you a case to hold all your various drone parts plus an extra three batteries and a charging hub. If you spend $2,000, you get access to the longer-lasting High Capacity Flight Battery. Antigravity also has a set of propeller guards and replacement drone lenses for sale. Either way, the A1 will demand an investment in time, money, and all your wayward charging cables.
Judging by the number of pieces that make the A1 drone work, it feels like the engineers were trying to fill out a consumer tech bingo card. I first got hands-on time with an early version of the drone back in August, and yet the company has made huge strides in controls, menus, and usability in the short time since then. Still, to use the A1 requires three peripherals: the Vision Goggles, the Grip Motion Controller, and the A1 itself.
To call this a first-gen product would be ignoring just how much batshit engineering has gone into this amalgamation of AR (augmented reality) headset and drone. The Vision Goggles is relatively light, but it comes with a snug fit. It has two knobs at the bottom to set the PPD, or pixels per degree, which each user will need to twist to fine-tune how clear the screen UI will appear. Inside, it uses two pancake lenses with 1-inch micro OLED displays, each at a 2,560 x 2,560 resolution. It’s a combination of Meta Quest 3-like optics with updated visuals pushing it closer to an Apple Vision Pro or Samsung Galaxy XR.
The Antigravity A1 includes a range of sensors, both for obstacle sensing and for capturing 360 video and photos. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
Once inside the headset, when you move your head, you’ll be able to look freely up, down, left, right, frontways, slantways, however you want. The drone stitches the images from the two lenses, and you won’t ever see any drone parts in your view, save for rare scenes when taking off or touching down. Like the Apple Vision Pro, the A1’s goggles use a separate battery that gets plugged into a port at the bottom. Instead of leaving a long leash in your pocket, the battery is meant to dangle like a necklace. There’s no on or off button on the headset, either. You turn the Vision Goggles on and off again with the battery itself. If you lose the battery, you’ve lost access to the headset.
The visuals from inside the Vision Goggles are already of good quality, though the fact the drone is streaming video to the headset means you’ll inevitably lose detail. We flew the drone well over 500 yards away on a clear day in Calvert Vaux Park in lower Brooklyn, and we didn’t experience any lag or streaming disruptions. Antigravity says its low-latency OmniLink 360 transmission system is the secret to clear video, and in my own tests that proved mostly true. The live view is only ever viewed at a max of 2K resolution and 30 fps inside the headset. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll always have such clear visuals in areas with more interference. The A1 routinely warned there was some kind of magnetic disruption in the area, even though we stood in an empty field for more than two hours. It gave me the same warning at home and in Gizmodo’s office, so I’m not quite sure what it was detecting.
The Antigravity A1’s Vision Goggles include an exterior screen on one of the lenses showing other people what you’re currently seeing. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
If there’s any one element that captures the ludicrous nature of the A1 experience, it’s that the Vision Goggles have a special defogging function you can access from the main menu. This kicks in the internal fan system in case your eyes are getting extra sweaty in between the face cushion and surprisingly solid light seal. That round exterior screen will show any users looking at your face what you’re currently seeing. Plus, when you flip up both the antennas, you’ll look like the classic Japanese bug-faced superhero Kamen Rider. There are so many excessive things about this headset that don’t actually need to be there. Still, if you were looking for a fun device, there are few things more entertaining than an evil eye that shows onlookers what your drone is currently spying on.
The first “experiential” drone?
You have no choice but to use the Vision Goggles to pilot the A1. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
The entire concept behind a 360-degree camera is that users don’t need to do anything but hit the record button for the sake of capturing all angles of your antics. The one complication is that users then need to manually pick out their best shots in the edit room. When you stick the same technology on a drone, it takes on a whole new life with its own share of considerations.
The A1 drone itself isn’t that big or heavy. It weighs in at about 249 grams, or about 0.54 pounds with the regular battery, though it’s closer to 291 grams, or 0.64 pounds, with the high-capacity battery. That’s the scale of most drones and it’s light enough you don’t need to register it with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Its size reminds me first of the DJI Air 3S, which I spent some time with close to a year ago. The A1’s four propeller arms fold up into a neat bundle that fits snugly into an included hardshell case. Sure, that may not sound that big, but consider you also need to have the controller and goggles with you to fly the A1, and you’ll be weighed down a little more on any adventures.
Before you fly, you have to remember what your controller looks like. Once you have your headset on, you’ll have nothing but memory to hit any of the necessary controls. The headset takes you through a set of hands-on tutorials for all the various button layouts, but even then I was often stuck taking off it off to see what I was doing. To reset and recenter the screen, you need to find the large scroll wheel—which also manipulates the horizontal orientation—and click it in. The controller’s menu button is a tiny key on the controller’s right side that’s impossible to find inside the headset. Even if the controller had a better layout, it would still be constrained by the inherent drawback of this drone’s design when there are no other control options, either with your phone or a traditional dual-stick controller.
You really can’t tell what you’re doing on the controller when you’ve got Vision Goggles headset on. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
You’ll also need to register the A1 drone with Antigravity’s services to get access to all of its flight features. Without registering, you’ll be limited to flying 50 yards in the air and 30 yards away. However, after I installed everything, pushed through several firmware updates (which became a pain of desperately connecting and reconnecting the drone), registered my drone, and thumbed through all the lengthy tutorials, taking to the skies was a far easier exercise. The headset will show a crosshair of the direction where your controller is pointing. Holding down the trigger puts the drone into gear, and steering it merely requires pointing in a new direction.
This means you can be looking anywhere in the drone’s field of view but be flying in a completely different direction. The headset’s view will show with a picture-in-picture at the top of the screen showing a view of what’s in front of the drone’s sensors. This is why my brother took very little time to understand the drones controls. In the air, the only thing the pilot has to mind is the trigger. If you let off the gas, the A1 will simply hover in the air, spinning based on the direction of the controller. Flying it is a joy as well, which is only enhanced with its simplicity.
In addition to regular flying, there are preset flying patterns if you want to do a orbit shot or even set a predrawn flight path. While these features are more important on non-360 camera drones, the fact you have to use the headset and controller to select these options anyway makes them less useful than if there were other control options. However, the features do make it easier for non-flyers to experience the sights without having to figure out the A1’s controls.
Like your typical DJI drone, you can set the A1 to Normal, Cinematic, and Sports flying. With the toggle in “S” mode, the drone can reach a top speed of 35.8 mph, or 16 m/s, though it slows to a crawl of 6.7 mph, or 3 m/s, in “C” mode. In my tests of the pre-production drone back in August, the A1 would slow down every time I attempted a sharp turn. In this new version, I didn’t experience any of those same issues. Taking it through a small obstacle course made up of jersey barriers and threading the drone through a small copse of trees didn’t require any fine manipulation. I pointed, and the drone did the rest.
At least the A1’s object avoidance sensors did a good job at keeping me out of range of trees. The drone uses a binocular vision system supplemented with infrared sensors to avoid smacking into the ground. It will still struggle to detect thin branches, which may prove a hazard if you plan to shoot in the woods.
This ‘Virtual Cockpit’ feature is pretty wild, but doing FPV flying really isn’t the best way to control this drone. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
In the drone’s menus, you can also enable an first-person view, or “FPV” mode, that is supposed to offer a more familiar experience to people who have flown other first-person drones. In this mode, you can also enable a “Virtual Cockpit” that will create a badly rendered 3D dragon underneath you. It’s cute, but entirely unnecessary. The FPV mode is already more difficult to maneuver than the default setting.
There’s really no comparison. The A1 isn’t made to complete any fancy tricks like a barrel roll or somersault. Other FPV drones like the DJI Avata 2 rely on their gimbal-mounted sensor and zippy flying capabilities to help pilots line up the right shot, but the idea behind the 360-degree camera mounted on the A1 means it doesn’t need any fancy flying to capture what it needs to.
The A1 tries to split the difference between a consumer-level “just for fun” drone and a more professional-minded quadcopter built for people who plan to do some proper filmmaking. It’s easily one of the most fun drones you can buy today, one that you can effortlessly share with friends. For professionals, the choice gets more muddled.
Not quite an Insta360 X5 on a drone
The A1 drone isn’t the zippiest one around, but it’s so easy to fly you’ll find it easy to maneuver around most obstacles. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
Insta360’s class-leading X5 360-degree camera is still one of the best around despite GoPro and DJI trying to knock it off its throne. If you thought that the Antigravity A1 would simply be an X5 strapped to a drone, it was never going to be that simple.
The A1 can shoot video at a maximum 8K resolution and 30 fps, with options down to 24 fps. While the number of people who use an 8K TV is infinitesimally small, you actually want to capture 360 footage at such a high resolution. The camera is essentially two sensors working in tandem, recording all the pixels in huge arc. Otherwise, you’ll have options for capturing 5.2K footage at up to 60 fps. If you want to shoot at 100 fps or for any true slo-mo experience, you need to drop it down to 4K.
Both the headset and drone each have a slot for a microSD card, though the drone itself does have an extra 20GB of internal storage just in case. The A1 can accept cards as large as 1TB, which should be enough for all casual and most professional drone flyers.
Using the Antigravity A1 requires that you keep three separate devices charged, including the battery pack for the headset which you wear around your neck. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
The actual sensor on the drone is 1/1.28-inch in size with an f/2.2 aperture. That’s a larger aperture than the f/2.0 on the X5, though it won’t make too big a difference in terms of depth of field. The A1 has a slightly smaller max video bitrate (170Mbps versus 180) but the same ISO range. So it should be just as capable as the X5 360-degree camera, right? Well, in my testing, the one issue I came across was the video stitching. On a regular 360-degree camera, it has to close the gap between the two sensors to make the spherical video look seamless. The gulf between the two sensors on the A1 is much wider than on a stick camera. In my footage, I would see some strange artifacts and occasionally notice close-up objects distort when I finally had the chance to take a gander at the final footage.
The drones also include a small menu option to enable a feature for enhanced AI stitching, though that doesn’t impact the final footage. You won’t know if you’ve produced any visual artifacts until you watch the footage yourself, which thankfully can be done inside the Vision Goggles. That could still pose a problem for any amateur cinematographer. The entire point of this drone is to get the shot without needing to be at the right place at the right time. Any visual distortion could lead to messy post-production cleanup work. For an example, watch the family that came to visit me during one of my flights. Their faces start to flicker and distort to an annoying degree.
And if you plan to shoot in low light, the A1 may not be the best one for it. Even when outside with the sunset on the horizon, the 8K footage started to look grainy. Indoors, low-light shooting looked far worse.
Antigravity also offered me a look at its new Antigravity Studio editing software built specifically for 360-degree footage. It’s essentially the same software as Insta360 Studio, which is to say it’s simple enough to use even for a complete amateur. I edited several videos using simple keyframes to set the shots I wanted at the 9:16 aspect ratio. I also played around with some of the transitions, like one that creates a “tiny planet” effect by zooming out through the fisheye lens. I didn’t do any post-processing work to make each video look better, but with a mix of 8K and 5.2K footage, you can see the difference in base quality. Any 8K footage will inevitably look better on a 360-degree camera.
Antigravity Studio crashed several times as I attempted to export footage. It may be a result of beta software on Windows, so I can’t get too riled up about it. The app is also available on Mac. However, it does point to a common problem among 360-degree cameras. If you simply want to upload your cool drone shots to TikTok or Instagram, it will inevitably take more effort than a more traditional camera or drone. The Antigravity app supposedly allows users to share their footage right from the drone and complete some easy highlight reels akin to what you can do in the GoPro Quik app. However, I couldn’t connect the A1 drone to my phone after many, many attempts.
Battery life depends on how much you spend
Antigravity also sells a separate landing pad in case you plan to take off in a grassy field. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The Antigravity A1 comes with a single battery in the basic bundle, though for review the company sent me the Infinity Bundle, which comes with three “high-capacity” flight batteries. The less expensive standard bundle only comes with three regular flight batteries. The regular battery clocks in at 2,360mAh, while the high-capacity version is almost double that at 4,345mAh. How much you spend on the drone will dictate how much flight time you get.
The regular batteries are rated for approximately 24 minutes of flight time, while the high-capacity versions will let you go for closer to 40 minutes. In reality, you’ll get less flight time when you start recording, especially at 8K. I went out into my tests with four high-capacity batteries. Running the drone near-continuously and shooting at 5.2K, I blew through three whole batteries in a little less than two hours. When each battery reaches around 15%, the drone will initiate an automatic return-to-home landing.
Those landing gears extend automatically, though you need to physically retract them after you turn off the drone. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
Still, it was enough for a fun outing with friends, even if it required close to 30 minutes of charging with the included Charging Hub. The hub can charge three batteries at once, although strangely enough the middle battery requires exposing the charging pins on the rear side and cradling it in an exposed bracket. DJI’s charging hub has three separate pockets for all three batteries at once. Antigravity likely wanted to make the hub fit inside the carrying case, which I’ll add is a very handy inclusion since you’ll need to carry the headset, controller, and drone with you everywhere.
I didn’t have the opportunity to test the less-capable battery. Whether the promised 24 minutes of battery life (likely less when recording at 8K) is good enough for you depends on how you plan to use it. Hopefully, you’ll get the necessary shots you want without having to do many reshoots. With the stitching problem, you may need to carry some extra batteries with you just in case.
There’s no drone like it
The A1 folds up into a pint-sized package. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
The Antigravity A1 is desperate to split the difference between what’s merely a fun drone and something any regular flyer will want to have on hand. For its $1,600 starting price, you get everything you need to fly the drone, though you’ll end up spending more for extra batteries. I have a hard time recommending the standard bundle considering the lack of a carrying case and batteries, so most people who buy the A1 drone will end up spending more than the base price. Compare that to other FPV drones, and you have to justify the 360-degree camera for the extra cost. A DJI Avata 2 Fly More Combo that includes three batteries, a case, controller, and headset, retails anywhere between $1,500 to $1,800 on Amazon depending on how many accessories you want. (Of course, that’s before all DJI drones are effectively banned in the U.S.)
This drone is not a simple commitment, despite how easy it is to use after you get used to its odd controls. Sure, it could be a toy you take out to impress your friends or family, but the A1 is better as a device you use to explore your environment. You can truly get a sense for the scale of a place through the ability to look everywhere around you. You can take that same footage home and spy on things you may have missed when you were staring off at the distant horizon.
There are no drones I can say that made me want to go out and fly it more than the Antigravity A1. © Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
And there’s truly nothing else like it that I’ve personally experienced. Novelty may be enough for some, but others—including myself—are just looking for a usable drone. Even as a first attempt, the A1 manages to clear that bar, despite some occasional issues with the end footage. So if you’re looking for the most unique drone you can get in the U.S. (especially considering DJI has effectively stopped launching drones stateside thanks to Uncle Sam’s protectionist policies), you don’t have to look further than this one.
