Toy of The Year

Cutting through the air, turning on a dime and transforming your living room or garden into a laser-strafed, real-life computer game, the AR.Drone is the toy of the year. It is to flying toys what the iPad is to earlier tablets: Not so much a development as a quantum leap forward a reinvention. Born aloft on four rotors, this squat, alien flying machine is controlled from your iPhone or iPod touch via Wi-Fi and a free app, and exhibits uncanny control and acceleration. Take your hands off the controls and it hovers, waiting. Give it a prod with your finger and it will actually resist the motion, “bouncing” back to its original position. Outside it pulls off the same trick in winds up to 20 kph.

A combination of onscreen virtual joysticks and the iPhone’s accelerometer makes the AR.Drone incredibly easy to fly, while an array of sensors make it exceedingly hard to crash. Even if you do pile it into a wall, as we did when trying it out — not due to ineptitude you understand just to test it — it’s impressively robust. Cameras mounted in the nose and underbelly of the device constantly send back to your iPhone and also make possible an even more impressive possibility: Augmented reality gaming. Your surroundings can be filled with alien structures, while overlaid graphic enemies and rival AR.Drones can be shot down with virtual phasers.

We compared the AR.Drone to the iPad earlier and that was not meant as a joke. As with Apple’s device, Parrot’s UFO is a “platform”, packed with tech just waiting to be utilised by the development community. Anyone can make apps and games for the AR.Drone, and control could be from any Wi-Fi device, though the iPhone is a natural place to start. The innards are incredibly sophisticated, with motion and orientation sensors, dual cameras and fail-safes that initiate a phased shutdown should your Wi-Fi range or battery run out. If it had GPS, it would boast essentially the same tech as a cruise missile. The battery only lasts 12 minutes, but a spare can be plugged straight in. We’d get one if we were you Diwali is going to involve a hell of a lot of battery swapping…

Price: Rs. 22,000, ardrone.parrot.com Coutesy T3