Antigravity A1 (Drone)

Capture a site from the air with the Antigravity A1 360 drone and build a MultiSet VPS map from the raw .insv.

The Antigravity A1 is a 360° camera drone. It records the same raw .insv dual-fisheye file that MultiSet already ingests from handheld Insta360 cameras, so an aerial capture runs through the identical pipeline: upload the .insv, MultiSet stitches it to equirectangular server-side and reconstructs a VPS map from it.

Flying the capture is the fastest way to map what you cannot comfortably walk: building exteriors and facades, roofs, campuses and car parks, construction sites, and open outdoor areas too large for a single walking take.

Three things decide whether the reconstruction succeeds: smooth flight, coverage at every altitude, and stable light.

Everything on this page is about what changes when the camera flies. Camera settings, exposure discipline, and the reconstruction principles are the same as handheld capture, documented on Insta360 Scans.

Flying a different drone? If its 360 camera exports a stitched equirectangular .mp4 rather than a raw .insv, the flight guidance below still applies, but upload through Equirectangular MP4.

Too tight to fly? In a confined or unstable space, capture on foot with an Insta360 camera instead.

Before you fly

Area	Checks
Drone	Both lenses cleaned. Propellers and landing gear inspected. Flight battery fully charged. MicroSD inserted with free space. Firmware and app up to date.
Controller	Vision Goggles and Grip Controller charged. Flight mode set to C / Cinematic, never Normal or Sport.
Weather	Daylight, good weather. No rain, snow, fog, or strong wind. The more even the light, the better the result.
Scene	No dominant moving subjects (cars, people, swaying branches) in the area you care about. Light stable enough to last the whole clip.
Airspace	Take off from an open area with reliable GNSS, and confirm local no-fly rules before launch.

Camera settings

Open Menu on the Grip Controller, go to Camera Parameter Settings, and turn on Pro mode. Set everything manually before you record. Auto exposure is the single biggest cause of grey, smeared reconstructions.

Setting	Value
Shutter	1/2000 in bright sun, 1/1000 in overcast or dimmer light. Never auto. Below 1/1000 the frames blur.
EV	−0.7
ISO	Auto
White balance	Fixed preset matching the scene's colour temperature. Never auto.
Codec	H.265 (Efficiency mode)
Bitrate	High
Outdoor daylight	8K at 30 fps, for maximum detail when the light is strong
Lower light, or when the drone must keep moving	5.2K at 60 fps, which trades resolution for sharper frames when blur is the bigger risk

Movement rules

Rule	Detail
Cinematic mode	Fly in C / Cinematic so the aircraft stays slow and smooth. Sport and Normal are too abrupt for reconstruction.
Move slowly and evenly	Constant speed, no acceleration bursts.
Rotate through motion	Do not use the 360 Dial Button (the black wheel on the Grip Controller). Every turn happens while the drone is moving, never a pivot on the spot.
No abrupt input	No sudden yaw, jerks, hard braking, or aggressive altitude jumps.
Keep clear	Maintain a safe distance from obstacles, and widen the path rather than risk a close pass in wind.
Close the loop	Return close to the starting position before you stop recording.
One clip per zone	Never stop recording between passes. The whole zone is one continuous clip.

How close to fly

The closer you fly to a surface, the more detail the reconstruction recovers from it. Distant passes produce low-resolution surfaces. As a rule, fly as close as you safely can to every surface you care about, then add a wider pass for context.

• Facades, walls, structures: zigzag along the surface at a close but safe distance, then repeat wider.

• Wide scenes: combine a close pass with a wider pass at a larger radius, so the map has both detail and context.

• Never trade safety for proximity. If an obstacle or the wind makes a close pass risky, widen the radius.

Coverage: four passes

One continuous clip, four passes, in this order:

Pass	What to fly
1. Establishing, mid-altitude	One smooth orbit (or oval) around the full subject. For a property, one perimeter sweep that shows every primary side.
2. Fill-in snake	Cover the entire surface with a back-and-forth lawn-mower path, keeping 30 to 50% overlap between lanes and a controlled distance to the surface. Pick up lower facade detail, steps, railings, and landscaping on the low lanes.
3. Higher and wider	Roofline, upper facade, tree canopy, and the surrounding spatial context.
4. Reverse return	Fly back toward the start from a different angle, closing the loop so the beginning and end of the clip connect cleanly.

Low, mid, and high coverage are all required. A capture flown at a single altitude will not reconstruct properly.

Trajectory by subject

A flat plane needs a lawn-mower pattern, not a circle. Match the path to the shape of what you are capturing:

Pick the trajectory that matches your subject. Every path is flown as one continuous clip, ending back where it started.

Subject	Path
Building facade (flat plane)	Vertical snake. Start at a bottom corner close to the surface, fly straight up, slide sideways, fly straight down, slide sideways, and repeat across the full width.
Sculpture, tower, or tree (cylinder)	Spiral. Start low and close, circle the subject while rising slowly, and complete several loops so it is covered bottom to top from every angle. One orbit at one height is never enough.
House or villa (volume plus surroundings)	Four stages. A low perimeter orbit at 1 to 1.5 m above ground close to the walls, a mid perimeter orbit at 2 to 3 m slightly wider, an overhead lawn-mower snake across the whole footprint for the roof, then a wide spiral descent at roughly 2× the house's extent to pick up trees, ground, and neighbourhood.
Large territory (horizontal plane)	Parallel lanes. Cross the site in low lanes, reversing direction each lane like mowing a lawn.

Waypoint flight (Sky Genie). Instead of flying the shape by hand, drop 8 to 20 waypoints at the corners and inflection points of the path you planned, then let the drone fly it. Interpolated flight removes the pilot's micro-corrections, which is what keeps speed constant, viewpoint spacing predictable, and frames free of motion blur. One automated pass is not enough on its own: add manual fill-in at other heights and distances.

Clip length

5 to 10 minutes per clip works best, with 10 minutes as the practical maximum. Map a larger site as several clips rather than one long one, then join the resulting maps with MapSet : Multiple Maps.

Metric scale

No calibration marker is needed. A printed ChArUco board is unreadable from flight altitude, so aerial captures are scaled after processing instead.

Once the map is active, open it in the Developer Portal, click View Splat, then Scaling: measure something whose real length you know (a door, a parking bay, a facade panel), enter that length in metres, and confirm. See Map Scale for the tool and the equivalent API.

Quality control

Check all five before uploading. If any one fails, re-fly rather than upload:

• Main subject captured from low, mid, and high viewpoints.

• A return / loop-closing path exists.

• No motion blur.

• No sudden exposure or white-balance jumps.

• No missed sides or empty gaps.

Export and upload

• Export the raw .insv. Do not re-export the capture as an MP4, and do not stitch it yourself. MultiSet stitches server-side.

• One .insv per .zip. One .insv produces one map.

• Keep each .zip under 50 GB.

Because the A1 writes the same raw format as a handheld Insta360 camera, it is uploaded under the Insta360 provider:

1. Open the MultiSet Developer Portal and choose Upload Existing Map.

2. Scan Type: select 360 video.

3. Choose Provider: select Insta360.

4. File Format: select Zip (.insv file compressed in .zip format).

5. Pick the map location, then drag and drop the .zip on the Upload Map step.

Allow up to one hour for processing. You will receive an email notification once the map is ready.

Mapping a large site? Fly it as several separate recordings, upload each .insv as its own .zip, then combine the resulting maps into one coordinate frame with MapSet : Multiple Maps. This is also how you join an aerial capture of a building's exterior to a walked capture of its interior.