![]() But both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat have much more impact when multiple people are involved. As you play, you accrue upgrade points which you can spend on additional weapons, armor and other parts that make the cars into fiercer, more customized competitors, thereby changing the dynamics of play over time.Īll of this is a blast if you compete against A.I.-controlled vehicles, each of which you can set to one of three difficulty levels: Easy, Medium or Hard. (You need to use your imagination, since the combat is represented by flashing lights on the cars and sound effects generated by your phone.) The driver who reaches a preset number of points first wins. Instead, you score points by shooting at them. Yep - Anki may describe what you’re doing “racing,” but in the primary game mode, you don’t win by lapping the other cars. And you can deploy weaponry - such as a pulse carbine or a tractor beam - which varies from vehicle to vehicle. You can steer left and right by waggling your iPhone to and fro. If you’re driving a car, you can control its speed. And it does it all in real time, with balletic precision - so smoothly that you can ignore the fact that it’s a remarkable technical achievement and just play. All the heavy computational lifting is done by the Anki app on the iPhone of the person hosting the race: It handles all the maneuvers for any A.I.-controlled vehicles on the track relays commands from the human players to their cars and keeps track of where all the cars are in relation to each other. But in reality, they aren’t that brainy: Mostly, they can move forward, steer, use sensors on their undersides to determine where they are on the mat and report their coordinates back to the controlling iPhone via Bluetooth. ![]() It looks for all the world like the autos are thinking for themselves, especially since capabilities such as speed, acceleration and agility vary from model to model. (I did witness a few accidents in which vehicles careened out of bounds, but they were rare.) Human-driven cars operate in a computer-assisted mode - they never stop completely, and under most circumstances you can’t drive them off the track, intentionally or unintentionally. They speed around it confidently, handling curves with aplomb and avoiding collisions with other vehicles. Even though the track is printed on a flat piece of plastic, the cars know that it’s there. Here’s where Drive’s robotics and artificial intelligence kick in. (I knew that my living room was too cramped to be Anki-friendly without a major reconfiguration of furniture, so I tried the set out at the office, on our gigantic conference-room table.) Other than rolling out the mat, there’s no setup involved - not even the sometimes-gnarly Bluetooth pairing process which I assumed I’d have to complete before the Anki iPhone app could connect to the cars. The mat is exceptionally spacious: 8.5-feet long by 3.5-feet wide, with a jumbo-sized loop of “track.” That makes for more enjoyable play, as long as you’ve got the room to accommodate it. Designed for use by everyone from little kids to gadget-happy adults, it goes for $200 - an imposing price tag for a toy, though not wildly out of whack with what high-end slot-car sets once cost after you adjust for inflation. The finished product, which is called Anki Drive, arrived in Apple Stores this week. You can control any of company’s bots yourself using an iPhone as your dashboard, or allow it to handle the job itself via artificial intelligence.ĭo I need to explain why I was smitten with the idea from the moment Anki unveiled it at Apple’s WWDC event last June? They’ve got four wheels and headlights and spoilers, and zip around a track. Its first robots happen to be rather small. A startup called Anki, founded by Carnegie Mellon scientists, aims to bring advanced robotics and artificial intelligence technologies into the home. I wanted TCR desperately, but nobody ever gave it to me.įast forward to 2013. The setup also included a “jam car” which drove itself. It was Ideal’s Total Control Racing, a dazzling slot-car system that let automobiles switch lanes as they zoomed around the track. When I was most intensely interested in toy race cars - which would be back in the 1970s - there was no question what the state of the art in that particular category of plaything was.
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