When three months ago a young and enthusiastic American entrepreneur, Amit Gupta recorded a video of himself standing atop a hill with his friends, we saw the dawn of a brand new trend- Dronies.

Dronies are basically selfies recorded through a drone or a short video (also could be in a gif.) of yourself taken by a drone. It is one of the coolest uses of remotely controlled pilotless aircraft.

Drones have been used by the military for years and now it has slowly found its way to the mainstream consumer world in miniature form. With Amazon’s dream of delivering packages to consumers through the use of drones still at an ideating phase, dronies happened and have become the latest sensation.

A Short History of Dronies

The word ‘dronie’ has been coined by the Photojojo founder Amit Gupta, three months ago, with response to his highly impressive previously mentioned video atop the hill. Last month, Twitter introduced dronies at the Cannes Lions Advertising festival. They used a flying camera to take short videos of people in the garden and later edited it to make it look like the drone has zoomed down from space. The trend has since taken off and over 1200 dronies have been uploaded on social media sites including Instagram with the #droniehashtag.

What’s Next?

Now, drone selfies are hitting the snow clad slopes New Zealand. The tourism department of New Zealand has come up with the idea of launching a pair of DJII Phantom Vision2 drones. These drones would be controlled by a team of operators or pilots so that the snowboarders and skiers can take back a priceless memento with them.

The drones would be used to take an eight second clip of the tourists while scanning through the panoramic view of the landscape. This clip would be later sent to the tourist’s mobile phone and also shared on social media using #NZdronie.

How to Get a Dronie of your Own?

Few days back two drones made their way into a crowd funding site, Kickstarter, both designed to allow people to click dronies. Hexo Plus and AirDog are the two providers that are selling camera drones. So, for increased number of likes on your social media profiles, all you have to do is shell out some $20,000and you can own one of the cool drones. However, make sure you can operate them well!