Raphael Pirker, the entrepreneur behind Team BlackSheep, asked me if I saw the birds. Tilting my head up at the foggy skies above the hills of Moraga, California, I couldn’t see them — my view didn’t change, no matter which way I turned my head.

I had forgotten that my eyes were not my own — they belonged to a drone named Gemini.

I tilted my head back down, instinctively looking at the controller in my hands, even though I couldn’t see that either. My view, still of the mountains and the foggy sky, stayed the same. My thumb nudged the left joystick forward, and my line of vision went up until I finally saw three black birds circling near me, their outlines a bit fuzzy.

My body was a hundred feet below, standing on a hilltop a half hour east of the San Francisco Bay. The birds were high in the sky, and my drone, with its camera pointing toward them, was now flying at the same altitude. The buzzing eventually scared them off, and I thumbed the joystick down and guided the drone back toward me.

My body came into view: white goggles strapped to my face, controller in my hands, shoes soaked in the wet grass. It was the first time in my life I had stared at myself — from outside of myself.

Gigaom staffer Biz Carson tries her hand at flying a drone.

First-person drones

Before last week’s adventure in the East Bay’s hills, the one time I’d test-flown a drone was inside the Gigaom office, where the GPS didn’t work and the slightest flick of my finger on the handset sent the drone straight into the ceiling and crashing into the floor. Drones are meant to be flown outdoors, where GPS coordinates can pick them up and guide them, and you’re left tracking a whizzing orb in the sky with your eyes and maneuvering it via a controller it in your hands.

But that day in Moraga, I was with my Gigaom colleague Signe Brewster and drone advocate Raphael Pirker, who was in town from Hong Kong where he runs Team BlackSheep to go drone racing. It’s a natural progression for drone hobbyists, Pirker explained. Once they get good at flying around, people turn competitive and start racing in a kind of Star Wars–style pod-racing thing of the future.

First-person-view drones, or FPV drones, operate a little differently from the hobby drones you most often hear about in the news. They’re operated by relaying the video stream from the drone’s camera into a pair of virtual reality goggles, instead of piloting the device by just watching it in the sky.

But it’s not virtual reality in a typical sense. Most VR products tout a 360-degree experience — you can stand in a room and look all around it. FPV drones have a fixed view, so you can’t see what’s around the drone, only what the camera on the drone is seeing. Compared to Microsoft’s HoloLens project, FPV drones are not considered augmented reality either since you’re not using your own eyes to see reality with a projection upon it. In the Fat Shark–branded goggles, my peripheral vision was all black, but my eyes were focused on the green hills and gray horizon — not a virtual environment, but a future use case for VR technology.