Parrot’s AR.Drone: Polly wants a quadricopter

Latest Gadgets were invited to the launch of the Parrot AR.Drone in a swanky Central London location. In case you missed the AR Drones’ debut at CES 2010 the AR Drone is a toy helicopter with a difference. A quadricopter that you can control via Wi-Fi using a smart phone, the AR.Drone screams cool from the rooftops. If you ever watched AirWold as a child and dreamed of being Stringfellow Hawke, then this is the toy for you.

Creator Henri Seydoux spoke of his desire to fuse virtual and physical play – creating video games that you can interact with in the real world and the AR.Drone is pretty successful in this regard. The Quadricopter contains two cameras, one at the front, one at the bottom. The bottom camera connects to an Inertial Measurement Unit which measures horizontal speed for stability and has been adapted from military technology. And judging by how smoothly the AR.Drone flies it is working overtime. Both cameras can stream to your smartphone over WiFi as it creates a local network so you can use it outside. Flying the ‘copter is cool, but it’s hard to describe how cool having the images from both cameras beamed into your hands is.

Upping the cool stakes (sorry my thesaurus has failed me) the AR.Drone comes with some Augmented Reality Apps that overlay the real world with video games – hoops to dive through, enemies to look at, areas to bomb etc. AR.FlyingAce for example enables you to perform World War II battles. You can join the AR.Drone-Pilot Academy and improve your skills or compete against other AR.Drone owners. There is an SDK so expect a range of augmented reality games to appear over various platforms over time. You have to buy the apps from the App Store (on iOS at the moment), which seems a bit much given that the hardware alone is far from cheap.

Available in HMV from August 2010 for £299 the AR.Drone is an expensive toy aimed at rich kids or grow men or women with too much disposable income. But even as a grown man with too little disposable income I have a pretty hard time resisting.