During Apple’s long-awaited WWDC 2013 keynote on Monday, Anki showcased a toy-video game hybrid that uses iOS and Cupertino’s mobile devices to run a number of small, autonomous cars around a track.
Indeed, each of the tiny remote control cars communicated with an iOS device over Bluetooth LE to drive around a miniature race track. As AppleInsider points out, the small vehicles were actually driving themselves using technology called Anki Drive.
Anki cofounder and CEO Boris Sofman told the publication the technology took five years to develop, with the cars fully capable of reacting to their surroundings in real time.
“The cars are crammed with sensors and, presumably, a processor capable of digesting data and executing decisions pertaining to speed, direction and more,” he explained. “By taking samples thousands of times each second, the cars are capable of zipping around the supplied track at impressively quick speeds.”
The Anki Drive app is currently available in Apple’s App Store and can be used to introduce players and developers to the technology. The cars themselves will launch this fall for approximately $200, at which point the app will begin acting as a controller for the devices.
