iPhone-Controlled Helicopter With AR Games

andylim writes "Parrot has unveiled a remote-controlled helicopter that boasts augmented reality games. The helicopter is controlled using an iPhone or iPod Touch's accelerometer and touchscreen. There's a camera on the front of the helicopter, which you can use to navigate and to play augmented reality games, including a game that involves fighting a gigantic robot."

An iPod?

[c0mpliant]

Seriously, if other games controls on the iPod are anything to go by, I wouldn't want to be controlling a helicopter with spinning rotor blades, with an iPod

Re:An iPod?

[fractoid]

It seems pretty stable from the video. I wonder how well this electronically-stabilised-quadricopter technology would scale to, say, human-sized? :D I did a bit of research on blade loadings and suchforth and it seems that a helicopter weighing 200kg with pilot would need 30-40kW to lift off, can anyone with more experience confirm or deny? I'd love to see something with the same format but, say, 2m long, powered by nanophosphate lithium batteries with a 5-10min flight time.

Of course the AR stuff is also cool. I bet there's a market for that... run a service where your users print a specific patterned logo in a print ad, register it with your site, and on a phone running the right application the pattern loads a video or even 3D virtual animated object anchored to the logo.

Video Latency

[Plazmid]

Now the question is, is the video coming out of this thing in real time or near real time(laggy)? Soldiers testing man portable reconnaissance UAVs found the latency of near-real time video to be extremely annoying....

Re:An iPod?

[tolan-b]

The default software comes for iPhone/iPod but they've published an API and open sourced the demos. Good on them, this thing has great potential, hope it doesn't cost too much :)

Cars

[FlyingBishop]

Back when I was a kid, I never understood why they could make a game like gameboy camera, but they couldn't trade out that camera for an antenna connected to a car with a camera on it.

I suppose we still don't have it thanks to privacy concerns, but it would be so badass.

WIFI range?!

[An anonymous Frank]

I'm having trouble finding what I think is the essential stat: (battery life is 15 minutes, but) what is the wifi range?

Re:An iPod?

[goodmanj]

for model planes they were totally impractical just a few years ago.

Not true anymore. One of the side effects of the cell phone revolution is that their high-tech batteries and the micro-motors that make the phone vibrate allow you to build some great electric aircraft.

http://www.ezonemag.com/ [ezonemag.com]

I Fly e- powered R/C

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

The drones are allready there. You can put an R/C plane in the air in 1 hr for about $200 to take ariel video.

Spend ~700 you can get FPV AV and still pics and a gyro stabalized plane.

Spend ~900 and you can get FPV, and data logging including path traveled, altitude, airspeed, and gps.

Spend 1K (that's most of our payechecks) and you can get all the above with waypoints and return to home.

Spend just another hundred more, and you can power that setup for over 45 min. in the air. Oh, and it's silent. Next to no noise as percieved from the ground.

It's pretty scary actually, but I love how inexpensive the hobby has gotten. I'm not into the telemetry side yet, but I've done AV. I'm more of a speed / 3D freak at the moment. I've got a 100mph plane whose power setup was about $120 from a place in hong kong. I can fly it top speed for about 7 min or pulse glide for over 1/2 hr. It's sweet!