Antigravity A1 review: Immersive flying meets 8K 360 video capture

Antigravity might now have exploded into the drone scene – the brand kept on teasing the public in instalments over the last few months, somewhat de-escalating its own mega launch – but that didn’t stop drone enthusiasts, including myself, from speculating about what it will feel like piloting the world’s first 360º drone, backed by action cam giant Insta360.

I had a chance to fly a pre-production unit in July, which was a unique experience, but it also raised more questions than it answered. Is the ability to look around necessary for people to pay extra for the A1? How much does the drone cost to begin with? Can you use it for more than just aerial exploration while travelling, which Antigravity says is one of the main use cases for the drone?

The brand kindly sent over a production-ready drone a month ago to help me answer these questions. Sadly, the weather in the UK didn’t allow me to fly the drone every day since then, but I managed to give it a good try, nevertheless. It’s safe to say that the A1 is an incredibly fun drone and one of the standout gadgets of 2025.

It is, however, far from essential buy. If you need a drone for cinematic footage, you’d better off with a mid-range DJI, such as the DJI Mini 4 Pro, which costs less than half as much as the A1. If you’re a beginner with a limited budget, the DJI Neo or DJI Flip are a lot more approachable options, despite the beginner-friendly controls of the A1.

Will it stop people from buying and trying the world’s first 360º drone? I don’t think so. If anything, I would recommend the fully immersive flying experience the Antigravity A1 provides. For now, this is the only way to see a proper bird’s-eye view of the world while flying – and that’s something people might want to pay the premium price for.

Antigravity A1 review

Price and availability

The A1 is available now at Antigravity in three bundles, each including the drone, the Vision goggles and the Grip motion controller, the core hardware that defines the A1’s immersive flight system. Pricing is set globally, with clear regional tiers across all major markets:

All three bundles ship with the full A1 flight system, but the amount of gear you get increases meaningfully as you move up the range. The Standard Bundle includes one flight battery, a Vision Battery for the goggles, spare props, a carry case, corrective lens frames and the usual cables, straps and manuals.

Stepping up to the Explorer Bundle triples the number of flight batteries, adds a charging hub, doubles the spare propellers and introduces a sling bag for easier transport. For many users, this tier will likely offer the best balance of flight time and accessories.

The Infinity Bundle pushes further, replacing the standard cells with three high-capacity flight batteries, adding a Quick Reader for faster footage offloading, and including the same expanded accessory set as the Explorer tier.

Pricing puts the A1 directly alongside high-end camera drones. For roughly the same money, you could pick up a DJI Mini 5 Pro Fly More Combo, or even stretch toward a DJI Mavic 4 Pro with accessories. All of those offer excellent imaging and flight performance, but significantly different from the 8K 360° capture, a “fly first, frame later” workflow, or a motion-controlled, headset-first flight experience of the A1 straight out of the box.

Design and build quality

The Antigravity A1 doesn’t look or feel like any traditional camera drone because it isn’t one. It’s the first drone built entirely around a 360-degree imaging system borrowed from the Insta360 X5, and a headset-first control setup, and that philosophy shows in every part of its design.

At its core, the A1 is a sub-245-gram, EU C0-class aircraft when flown with the standard battery, which means it sits under key regulatory thresholds and is effectively travel-ready straight out of the box.

Folded, it’s genuinely compact, measuring 141 × 96 × 81mm, and feels closer to a palm-sized action device than a full drone. Unfolded, it stretches out to 308 × 382 × 89mm, and the transformation is surprisingly robust; during my flights, the arms locked out cleanly without wobble, and the chassis felt sturdier than its lightweight construction suggests.

The dual-lens system defines the A1’s silhouette. Instead of a single gimbal, the drone houses vertically opposed 360º lenses that capture the full environment. The two lenses are placed at the top and bottom of the aircraft, mounted on a wobbly gimbal that helps reduce shaking inherent to a flying drone.

The dual lens setup also explains some of the clever engineering choices: the retractable landing gear, for example, lifts the aircraft off the ground just enough to protect the bottom lens during takeoff and landing, without obstructing the stitch line for “invisible drone” shots.

I mentioned this in my hands-on experience piece in August, but the light at the front feels a bit tacky for such an expensive drone. The ability to change the colour of the light isn’t something people who spend this much money look for in a drone. Not to mention, you won’t see much of it since you’re wearing the Vision Goggle, and it won’t be visible in the final footage, either.

Speaking of the goggles, they use 1-inch 2,560×2,560 Micro-OLED displays and pancake optics, delivering a clean, responsive image in your hands-on tests. Paired with the Grip, which translates hand movement directly into directional flight, the A1 shifts the ergonomics away from “piloting a drone” and towards “inhabiting a viewpoint in the sky.” Even early test flights showed how natural this felt: point where you want to go, and the drone goes.

Despite its unusual shape, the A1 feels intuitive to handle. The surfaces are matte and grippy, the battery locks with a satisfying click, and the user-replaceable lenses and propellers underscore Antigravity’s emphasis on longevity. I like that places where you would typically pick up the drone have dents, making it easier to hang onto the A1 when not in flight.

From a build-quality standpoint, the drone behaves like a well-sorted lightweight aircraft. It’s rated to handle Level 5 winds (10.7 m/s), and in your real-world testing, it stayed stable even in (somewhat) gusty conditions. Hover accuracy sits within ±0.1 m with vision positioning, which helps enormously when you’re flying through the headset.

Camera performance

The Antigravity A1 isn’t trying to compete with the latest stacked-sensor camera drones on pure image quality. Instead, its selling point is the freedom of 8K 360° capture and the creative possibilities that come with it. With dual 1/1.28-inch sensors recording up to 8K30, 5.2K60, or 4K100, the drone captures a complete spherical view of the world every time it takes off.

That “shoot first, frame later” philosophy fundamentally changes how you use a drone. Instead of worrying about angles or horizon alignment while flying, you simply focus on keeping the aircraft stable and let the camera do the rest.

Even simple movements, like rising over a tree line, cruising along a footpath or hovering above a field, became usable footage from multiple angles. You can turn a single flight into a dozen different shots: a forward-facing reveal, a top-down lurch, a sweeping orbit, or even a backwards tracking shot that you never physically flew. It removes the anxiety around getting framing right in the moment and makes the A1 unusually forgiving for beginners.

Footage quality in good light is strong for a 360 system. Colours match cleanly between the top and bottom lenses, and the stitching holds together well when you’re flying smoothly. It’s not surprising, knowing that Insta360 has been at the forefront of 360º camera technology for years. The high bitrate and 8K resolution give you enough detail to crop heavily when reframing for typical social media formats.

Low-light is where the small sensor size shows its limits. Evening shots introduce noise, shadow detail drops quickly, and if you push into darker tree cover or fly past shade, the footage softens. That’s expected for 360 modules at this size. While not ideal for cinematic night flying, it’s more than adequate for travel, outdoor adventures or daytime creative shooting, which is what Antigravity recommends the A1 for.

As with Insta360’s cameras, the editing ecosystem elevates the experience. The Antigravity app and desktop software take the familiar Insta360 reframing approach and give you intuitive control over keyframes, pans, snap-angles, and subject tracking.

The automatic highlight tool picks out the best moments from your flight, while manual reframing lets you build polished shots with minimal effort. Deep Track can lock onto a moving subject in any direction, even if you weren’t pointing the drone at it during the flight, turning casual footage into something more intentional.

The ability to choose your angle after flying means every recording becomes a flexible canvas, making it easy to tell a story, shoot B-roll, or create social edits where you want multiple cuts from a single take. And because the A1 records in its own 360 container formats with final export via the app or Studio, you get consistently stable, stitched output without the usual complexity of multi-camera rigs.

Flight and piloting performance

The Antigravity A1 offers a flight experience unlike anything else in the consumer drone space, thanks largely to its Grip controller and headset-first control system. Instead of pushing dual sticks, you steer using natural hand movements, and the drone’s response is instinctive in a way traditional quadcopters rarely achieve.

If you’ve ever played a video game with motion controls, you’ll feel at home immediately. The tutorial walks you through the basics, and once you connect the dots between the crosshair in your view and the direction you’re pointing the Grip, the learning curve becomes surprisingly gentle.

The controller's buttons take a few tries to learn. With the Vision Goggles on, you can’t glance down to see them, so early flights involve nudging the headset up to check. Fortunately, the layout is logical, and each button has a distinct texture, which accelerates the muscle-memory process. Within a few sessions, the controls stop feeling experimental and start feeling natural.

Headset video quality is sharp, and the HUD is cleanly designed, though information pushed to the extreme corners of your field of view can appear soft. The goggles’ adjustability means most glasses wearers can fly without their prescription lenses, and the external battery pack – very Apple Vision Pro-esque in its execution – keeps weight off your face. You do have to wear the battery around your neck, but it never feels cumbersome during flight.

The biggest shift in mindset comes from the 360° visual freedom. You can look anywhere without disrupting the drone’s recorded perspective. It removes the usual anxiety about framing mid-flight because the camera captures everything.

However, the A1 always flies toward the crosshair, not wherever your head is turned: flight direction is tied to the aiming reticle rather than the pilot’s gaze. That design choice keeps control predictable but requires situational awareness, especially in environments with obstacles.

On that front, the A1 includes a forward and downward binocular vision system plus a 3D infrared sensor on the underside. It’s not equivalent to the multi-directional, high-speed obstacle avoidance found in premium flagship drones, but it does provide a useful safety layer.

The forward sensors can detect objects from 0.5–18m and remain effective at speeds up to 12m/s, with wide horizontal and vertical fields of view. The downward system offers a similar envelope for landing and low-altitude safety. In practice, it acts more like a cautionary buffer than a full autonomous collision-avoidance system, and pilots still need to fly smart in cluttered spaces.

Wind handling is solid for a drone of this size. The A1 is rated to resist winds up to 10.7m/s, and the combination of FlowState stabilisation and its weight distribution helps it maintain steady footage even when conditions aren’t perfect. It’s not designed for aggressive manoeuvres, but that matches its purpose as a 360-first aerial camera.

The “shared flying experience” feature is less compelling. The tiny screen built into the visor doesn’t replicate the immersive view you get when piloting, and it feels more like a marketing flourish than a meaningful use case. It’s hard to imagine the A1 getting dramatically cheaper without the display, but the feature doesn’t add enough to justify its presence.

Despite that, when you’re the one flying, the A1 feels exciting, approachable and genuinely new. It’s a drone that prioritises intuition and immersion over raw speed or pro-grade manoeuvrability, an identity that fits the 360-capture concept perfectly.

Battery life and charging

The Antigravity A1’s endurance depends heavily on which battery you’re using, and that choice meaningfully shapes the flying experience. With the standard Flight Battery, the A1 is rated for up to 24 minutes of flight time, while the High-Capacity Flight Battery pushes that to 39 minutes under controlled conditions.

In real use, those figures naturally shrink, but my hands-on testing aligns closely with Antigravity’s claims. Calm-weather flights sat in the low-20-minute range, and even with occasional wind and continuous 360 ° video capture, the A1 comfortably delivered sessions long enough for proper aerial sequences rather than stop-start clips.

The relationship between weight and endurance is worth noting: the standard pack keeps the A1 under 249g, making it easier to fly in more regions without additional certification. The high-capacity battery bumps it above that threshold, but the trade-off is a meaningful jump in flight time. It’s the classic portability-versus-endurance equation, and Antigravity gives pilots a genuine choice depending on how and where they fly.

Charging speeds are solid for a dual-battery ecosystem. On the hub, the standard battery charges in around 45 minutes, while the high-capacity pack takes roughly 60 minutes. Charging in the drone itself is slower, just under an hour for the regular battery and roughly 103 minutes for the larger one, so serious users will naturally gravitate toward the hub included in the Explorer and Infinity bundles.

Given the A1’s immersive nature and the tendency to quickly lose track of time while flying in goggles, having multiple batteries becomes almost essential if you’re out filming for extended periods.

The Vision Goggles also draw power from an external battery, a design that mirrors that of high-end mixed-reality headsets. I couldn’t find official battery life stats for the grip and the googles, but according to specs displayed on my HUD, the Vision Goggles should last well over 4 hours between charges. The grip’s battery also seems to last quite a while.

The goggle’s external battery unit does add one more power source to manage, but the separation ensures the goggles never heat up or feel heavy, and swapping this battery is far quicker than landing the drone to change its flight pack.

Verdict

The Antigravity A1 leaves me with mixed feelings, but mostly in the way that genuinely new technology often does.

It is a remarkable achievement and easily one of the most exciting gadgets of the year. True innovation in the drone world has been rare. HoverAir shook things up with the palm-landing X1 a few years back, but since then, most manufacturers, particularly DJI, have focused on careful iteration. The A1 changes that rhythm. It feels new in a way few drones have in a decade.

Antigravity, with Insta360’s imaging pedigree behind it, has delivered the world’s first fully realised 360-degree drone. DJI is undoubtedly circling with its Avata 360, and the company already has both aerial and spherical imaging expertise. Even so, Antigravity reached the finish line first. That alone is worth acknowledging because it required solving technical, optical and flight-control challenges that no consumer brand had cracked until now.

Being first comes at a cost, both figuratively and literally. The A1 sits firmly in the premium bracket, which naturally limits its audience. This is not a mass-market drone like the Neo or the Flip. Instead, it appeals to a more adventurous segment of creators and enthusiasts who enjoy testing the edge of what new hardware can do and who are willing to pay for access to that frontier.

The rewards are significant. The A1 delivers an experience that feels closer to inhabiting a viewpoint in the sky than piloting a camera from a distance. It gives you an entirely new visual language, and no other drone currently available can replicate the sense of freedom that comes from capturing everything around you and choosing your perspective later.

Even so, it will not replace prosumer drones for people who need cinematic single-direction footage, longer flight endurance or more advanced autonomous features. Nor is it the ideal choice for beginners on a budget. It sits apart from those categories because it is trying to expand the boundaries of what a drone can be rather than compete with what already exists.

For now, Antigravity deserves the attention it is getting. The A1 is bold, imaginative and hugely enjoyable to fly. If you have even a passing interest in drones and want something that feels genuinely different, this is the one that will make you stop, look up and smile.