Hi I’m Aarav Sharma and I want to direct a drone with my hands, not just piloting but actual direction.

Introducing AirLine: direct a drone with your hands, don’t pilot it. Most gesture drones map your hand to a flight stick (tilt to bank, raise to climb) — you become the joystick. AirLine instead reads cinematic intent (“follow that player,” “orbit the subject”) and figures out the flight itself, because it understands the scene. It’s a branch off my capstone SideLine (an AI sports-analytics system that already tracks “the player with the ball”), reusing its vision core untouched. Software first, glove I build myself next, drone last.

Devlog:

M1: AirLine runs SideLine’s tracker through a clean seam, vision core untouched. ~19 FPS.
M2: Lock onto one subject. Found track IDs fragment — 293/540 frames “lost.” Quantified the re-ID problem on footage, not a $400 drone.
M3: Virtual camera follows like an operated shot, drifts to wide when the target’s lost. First time it looked real.
M4: Webcam gestures (MediaPipe) — but it conflicts with my vision stack. Setup stopped instead of breaking it. Best decision of the day.
M5: Quarantined gestures in their own environment. First real-hand numbers: mostly 10/10 after fixing bugs unit tests missed.
M6: Two-process live system — my hand directs the shot in real time. ~297ms latency, only 35ms of it transport.
M7: First 3D camera move: orbit on a tiltable plane, proven by geometric invariants to machine precision (~4e-16).
M8: Added push-in, pull-out, dolly. Full shot vocabulary done. 146 tests, vision core never touched.

Next: hardware actually building the gesture glove by hand and integrating a drone