Gadgetory

are you ready for the next thing in smart racecars I'm Dan Ackerman and we're taking a look at Anki overdrive now if you've heard of Anki before that's because they brought out an earlier version of this system at one of apple's WWDC conference back in 2013 and they showed you an iphone controlling a race car going around the track very cool stuff but it was one static track sort of a first generation toy this new version works with iOS and with Android still has the same sort of remote control cards that you steer with your iPhone or your Android phone the big difference now is the track is completely modular you can buy this starter kit here for about 150 dollars that includes two cars a charger for the cars and a bunch of different tracks you can buy extra track pieces and you just put them together like this they snap together magnetically and then you can take them apart and put it back together any way you want there's all sorts of shapes you can make now hidden under the pattern here is some code that the car seat you can't see it but the car seat and that lets the electric eye on the cars see where the track is stay on the track and not go flying off anywhere so you don't do too much of the steering the cars do that automatically when you're using the iPhone app what you do is you shift the cars from one side to the other you can control whether on this side or this side like this and also acceleration but it's going faster or slower go around a turn too fast you could zoom right off and of course the cars you can get up to four of them going at once they can race against each other they have weapons built-in that you basically use by tapping a button on the app and that causes the other cars nearby to sort of short out or spin out of control or get damaged so you can zip past them you don't actually see them shooting at each other in real life maybe that's the next version of Augie set up is super easy especially when it comes to putting the tracks together getting the app going and solving all the phone's that you're gonna use and getting everybody into a game together that's a little bit more complicated a little bit of a learning curve there you know I feel like most of the time you're gonna want to skip most of the game modes and just do straight free racing with your friends that seems like what this is built for now if you want to get more involved with this and get everybody playing and build a very elaborate track a little bit of an investment is involved this base kit here is 150 dollars you can buy extra track kits they break down to about $10 per section of track and you get two cars here if you want to buy more cars there are a couple more available there forty-nine dollars each but once you put it all together you get everybody round race around the pool table like we did that is the Anki overdrive