The second National Drone Racing Championship was contested on August 7 on Governors Island in New York City. The winner was one Zachry Thayer, who races under the name “A_Nub.” But the biggest news wasn’t who won. It was that the whole event was streamed live on ESPN3.

You may not have realized there was a first National Drone Racing Championship—that happened last summer in Sacramento, and while around 120 people competed then, almost nobody saw it. Almost nobody saw the World Drone Prix in Dubai this past March either, although 250 teams entered and the winner, a 15-year-old boy from Somerset, England, took home $250,000.

But drone racing already has deep grass roots—there are dozens of local and regional drone races every month. The Drone Nationals which are run by an outfit called the Drone Sports Association, or DSA, are the biggest swing anybody has taken yet to bring the sport to the mainstream.

As young as it is, the origins of drone racing are still shrouded in mystery. “About four years ago you started to see stuff out of Australia about it,” says Nick Horbaczewski, CEO of the Drone Racing League, which notably did not run the Drone Nationals this weekend—not only is drone racing now a sport, there are several competing professional circuits. “About two years ago you start to see communities forming online—forum posts, how do I build a drone, where can I race it,” Horbaczewski adds. The basic idea is, you get a bunch of drone flyers together. You lay out a course. You route the video feed from your drone’s forward-facing camera through a pair of VR goggles, which gives you a drone’s-eye-view of the action. This is called first-person view, or FPV, and it makes you feel like you’re inside the drone, or possibly like you are the drone.

Then you fly the drones around the course at around 80 miles per hour. They make a noise like angry robot bees, especially on tight corners, and there’s a lot of crashing, but it’s hugely fun—people describe it as like being in a video game.

It’s also harder than it looks—racing drones don’t work like those easy off-the-shelf ones. The control schemes are much more complex and hands-on. Instead of an app on your phone you use a fat remote control with two joysticks which you manipulate simultaneously: the left stick controls throttle and yaw, the right stick handles pitch and roll. The first time you fly a racing drone you’ve got about as much chance of keeping it in the air as you do of driving a Formula 1 car out of the pits without stalling. “There’s a lot of calculations, and you’re doing it in three dimensions at very high speed,” Horbaczewski says. “When you watch the really good pilots, it’s like they’re using the Force.”

For the racers it is, by all accounts, as much a mind game as anything else: Uou have to have nerves of carbon fiber to keep your fingers steady under racing conditions. “In other things where there’s competition involved it’s usually gross motor functions,” says Conrad Miller, a father of four from Boise, Idaho, who flies under the name Furadi. “If I’m racing a motorcycle, I’m nervous, but I’ve got my whole body to control this thing. When I’m flying a drone I’ve only got my thumbs. When you have all that adrenaline coursing through you, it’s hard to control your fingers.” Furadi made the finals this weekend and finished fourth overall.

If drone racing is hard to do, it can also be hard to watch: the drones are small, and they tend to look a lot alike, so it’s not easy follow the action or even tell who’s winning. In a professional race the drones are usually equipped with bright colored LEDs so you can tell them apart, but it’s a major challenge for promoters and broadcasters and everybody else who’s trying to turn drone racing into a major-league business. The bar is high: there’s a high rate of infant mortality among newfangled sports leagues—for every Electronic Sports League (booming) and World Surf League (thriving) there’s a National Xball League (paintball).

So far drone racing may be running a year or two ahead of the broadcast and display technology, like VR and augmented reality, it will need to make it must-see entertainment. “We’re going to be entering into the world of multi-stream, multi-screen, multi-broadcast,” says Scott Refsland, the DSA’s chairman and chief evangelist. He imagines a future scenario of blended-reality events where audience members can race along with the pros virtually and remotely. “If you looked at a field with the naked eye, you would just basically see four drones. Whereas if you put on something like Hololens, now there’s 12 drones racing, and you get all the markers, all the various leaderboards, who’s what, who’s where, who’s in first.” Given that the racers are already essentially flying computers, it should lend itself well to high-tech innovation. “It’s a 21st century sport,” Refsland says. “It’s made for that. It’s Running Man–it’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger come to life! It’sThe Hunger Games!” (It could be argued that Arnold Schwarzenegger is in fact already alive, and the Hunger Games were actually a dystopian atrocity, but you see what he means.)

The business trends are in their favor, anyway. This year the Drone Nationals attracted some blue-chip sponsors, including AIG and GoPro. According to the NPD Group, drone sales over the six months ending in April of this year were four times what they were in the same period a year ago. The FAA estimates that Americans bought a million drones in the 2015 holiday season alone, with 2016 sales projected at 1.9 million. The DSA is setting up a World Drone Racing Championship in October, to be held at Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii, where Jurassic Park was filmed. We can assume that no expense will be spared.

第二届美国全国无人机锦标赛（National Drone Racing Championship）于8月7日在纽约总督岛拉开了帷幕。最终的胜者名为扎克里·泰勒，他的比赛用名是“A_Nub”。不过最大的新闻不是谁获得了冠军，而是这项赛事在ESPN3频道进行了全程直播。

你可能都不知道去年夏天在萨克拉门托举行的第一届美国全国无人机锦标赛。当时有120人参赛，几乎没有观众。也几乎没有人观看今年3月在迪拜举行的世界无人机大奖赛（World Drone Prix）。当时有250支队伍参加了比赛，获胜者是一名来自英格兰萨默塞特的15岁男孩，他赢得了25万美元的奖金。

不过无人机竞赛已经有了牢固的群众基础——每个月都有数十场当地和地区的无人机比赛。全国无人机锦标赛的举办方是一个名为无人机运动协会（Drone Sports Association, DSA）的组织，他们正在前所未有地努力将这项运动推向主流。

尽管无人机竞赛的历史很短，但它的起源仍是个谜。无人机竞赛联盟（Drone Racing League）的首席执行官尼克·侯巴祖斯基表示：“大约四年前，你就可以在澳大利亚看到这种类型的比赛。”值得注意的是，他们没有举办这个周末的全国无人机锦标赛，可见无人机如今不仅是一项运动，还存在许多互相竞争的职业圈。侯巴祖斯基补充道：“约两年前，你可以看到有很多社群开始在网上形成——论坛的帖子，怎样打造一架无人机，可以在哪里参加比赛。”它的基本理念就是让一群无人机爱好者一起玩。你可以开辟一块赛场。你可以通过虚拟现实眼镜，从无人机前面的摄像头上得到实时图像反馈，看到飞行时无人机的视角。这被称作第一人称视角（FPV），它让你感觉自己就坐在无人机里，或者你就是无人机本身。

随后，你就可以操纵无人机以大约每小时80英里的速度绕着场地飞行。它的声音就像愤怒的机器人蜜蜂，尤其是在低速弯道上，也会出现很多撞机事件，不过非常有趣——人们觉得这就像是在打电子游戏。

无人机的操纵也比看起来更难——它可不像那些售货架上的遥控飞机。控制模式要复杂得多，而且是手动的。这可不是手机上装个应用就能解决的事情，你需要使用一个硕大的遥控器，同时操纵两根摇杆：左摇杆控制油门和偏航，右摇杆控制俯仰和横滚。第一次操纵无人机飞行就让它停在空中的难度，就仿佛将F1赛车开出维修站而不让它熄火一样。侯巴祖斯基表示：“这涉及许多计算，你需要在三维方向上进行迅速操作。你看那些优秀的无人机操纵者，会感觉他们仿佛在使用原力。”

人们普遍认为，对无人机操纵者而言，这就是一场心理游戏：你必须要有碳素纤维般的神经，让你的手指在竞速环境下保持稳定。来自爱达荷州博伊西的康拉德·米勒是四个孩子的父亲，这次以Furadi的名字参赛。他表示：“在其他竞赛中，你通常需要的是粗大运动功能。例如我参加摩托车赛，我感到很紧张，但我可以让全身来控制摩托车。但在操纵无人机时，我只能用自己的拇指。当肾上腺素在你体内大量分泌时，你很难控制住你的手指。” Furadi在这次周末的比赛中进入了决赛，最终获得了第四名。

无人机竞赛难以完成，也难以观看：无人机太小了，外型也很像，跟踪他们的移动甚至搞清楚是谁赢了，都不太容易。在专业的比赛中，无人机通常会装上鲜艳的发光二极管，让你区分它们。但对于努力想将无人机竞赛推广成为大规模商业联赛的推销商、直播商和其他人而言，这是一个很大的挑战。它的门槛很高：新兴职业联赛有着很高的夭折率——每一个电子竞技联盟（Electronic Sports League，蓬勃发展）和世界冲浪联盟（World Surf League，蒸蒸日上）的背后，都有一个全国漆弹联盟（National Xball League）。

到目前为止，无人机竞赛可能比虚拟现实和增强现实等直播和现实技术超前了一两年。这些技术会让它成为不容错过的娱乐赛事。无人机运动协会的主席和首席宣传官斯科特·莱弗思兰德表示：“我们将要来到一个多流媒体、多屏幕、多转播的时代。”他认为，未来在这种混合现实的赛事上，观众可以虚拟远程地观看赛事。“如果你用肉眼看赛场，基本上只能看到四架无人机。但如果你戴上了全息透镜，可能就会看到12架飞机。你还可以看到所有得分、各种排名，哪架飞机是谁的，它们在哪里，谁暂时领先。”考虑到参赛的无人机本质上就是飞行计算机，这很利于高科技创新。莱弗思兰德称：“这是一项21世纪的运动。它就是为此诞生的。这就像《威龙猛将》（Running Man）——阿诺·施瓦辛格死而复生！这就是“饥饿游戏”（The Hunger Games）！”（这里需要说明：阿诺·施瓦辛格目前尚在人世，“饥饿游戏”本身是反乌托邦的暴行。不过你可以领会到他的意思。）

不管怎么说，目前的商业趋势对他们十分有利。今年的全国无人机锦标赛吸引了包括AIG和GoPro在内的顶级赞助商。NPD Group的数据显示，截至今年4月的过去半年中，无人机的销量是一年前同期的四倍。联邦航空局（FAA）估计，光2015年的节日季，美国人就购买了100万架无人机，而2016年节日季的销量预计将达到190万架。无人机运动协会计划于今年10月在《侏罗纪公园》（Jurassic Park）的拍摄地：夏威夷古兰尼牧场（Kualoa Ranch）举行世界无人机冠军赛（World Drone Racing Championship）。我们可以预计，届时主办方一定会不吝成本的。（财富中文网）

译者：严匡正