Eternal Angler
Administrator
Anyone remember the movie The Abyss with Ed Harriss? Pretty ground breaking film for its time back in the 80s, if you remember there was actually a ROV in this film, aka underwater drone. Nicknamed the Little Geek, there's a little tid bit on Wikipedia about the ROV model that was used in the film, it was actually the Mini Rover MKII ROV, which was the second generation of the world's first small low cost remotely operated underwater vehicle. I suspect Abyss was the first movie to ever use an underwater drone, aka ROV in a Hollywood Movie.
I remember when I first saw the ROV moving around in the water, I thought it was so darn cool, I thought man if I could get to use something like that one day when I get older, that would be so cool. Little did I know I'd own one three decades later, I was about 7 years old when the Abyss movie came out. Maybe that's what subconsiciously got me interested in the underwater drone technology...?
So I purchased my Geneinno Titan T1 for around $2k, well guess how much the Mini Rover ROV sold for when it hit the market in 1983? It had a price tag of $26,850, the next lowest cost ROV was $100,000. The person that designed this little drone was Chris Nicholson of Deep Sea Systems International, Inc. (DSSI).
I guess you could say throughout history Hollywood and the movie realm has always been one step of head, showing us what the future could be like once the technology reaches the consumer level at an affordable price. I think later in that movie Ed Harris used little Geek to go down 17,000 feet meters to diffuse a nuclear warhead at the bottom of the ocean trench, but the little drone ends up imploding, kind of a scary sight to see. I'd say this sci-fi flick is quite enjoyable and thrilling to watch even 30 years later, just like Ridley Scott's movie Alien. Some movies just never get old!