Drones are the must-haves of 2015, right up there next with selfie sticks. This year has seen an explosion of drone-related incidents: spying on neighbours, accidental excursions into military airspace, and flying too close to aeroplanes. A world swarming with drones is fast-approaching, but is this a high-tech vision of the future, or is it in fact the last thing any of us want?

Superflux are the minds behind an intriguing R&D project called Drone Aviary, which envisions how drones could one day influence our lives. The project showcases five types of drone. Before you read on, please don’t have a panic attack thinking that these drones are currently roaming our streets. They’re just a projection of what the near-future could look like, but the technology behind them does already exist.

One of the drones is a Traffic Management Assistant called Routehawk. It zips up and down roads warning drivers of oncoming hazards, and also logs traffic violations. Another is the FlyCam, a drone that can fit in the palm of your hand. Equipped with a camera, it could well be the social media tool of the future; a way of having your own personal cameraman, except without having to actually force a cameraman to endure the boredom of documenting your day-to-day life.

But others are a little more ominous. Madison, the Flying Billboard, is an advertising drone that uses facial recognition to target consumer graphics, tailoring its ads to those around it. That’s right – this is an advert that follows you. No “Skip Ad” button, no way of opting out. Just you running down the street pursued by a flying billboard until you collapse onto the pavement in exhaustion, promising through floods of tears that, yes, you will visit Ikea later.

Next up is Newsbreaker, the Media Drone which films and streams news in real-time. What’s more, it then writes the reports itself, using story-writing algorithms to get a piece out there faster than any human could. If this drone ever makes it out onto our streets, it could mean death of the news correspondent. So enjoy the friendly human faces of Varsity while you can. It won’t be long before every article is written by drones ominously circulating Cambridge on the lookout for stories.

But creepiest of them all is Nightwatchman, the Surveillance Drone. In Superflux’s short promotional film about its drones, Nightwatchman definitely comes across as the most unnerving. It sees the world pretty much how the Terminator does, patrolling city streets amassing vast amounts of data, scanning faces for criminal records in order to detect civil offenses and terror threats. At the moment we tend to see drones as, at worst, a bit of a nuisance, but Nightwatchman highlights the more menacing side of their potential for privacy-invasion.

Drone Aviary raises some interesting questions about the future of drones. The US transport secretary has just recently called for a nationwide registering of unmanned aircraft. It seems regulators and law enforcers will need to act quickly to impose restrictions – this is a craze that’s not going to die out any time soon.