Over a year ago now, Anki Drive was unveiled to the world at the WWDC 2013 Apple Keynote. Tim Cook introduced the technology which struggled to fit in at the event. It piqued the attention of many big kids around the world though, who wondered if this could be the future of car racing on your living room floor.
Anki Drive has been available in the US for almost half a year now but it’s soon ready to hit the UK. In preparation we went hands-on with the technology to test it out and see how much fun it really could be.
So what exactly is Anki Drive? It’s a physical car racing game in which you use either an iPhone or iPad to control the cars. The starter kit comes with a 3.5 ft by 8.5 ft circular race track where you place the cars. Each individual car has a camera underneath to guide it around the track.
Each car feeds back information from the track to the iOS device, and then back to the car again at a rate of about 500 times per second, meaning the cars have instant reaction times. On your iOS device you can control the speed of your vehicle with a gauge on the left hand side and you can control the position on the track by turning the device from left to right.
On the right hand side of the app, which you can download for free from the app store, you have access to the weapons. There are five different varieties of cars to choose from which each have their own upgradable weapons. The more you play the more weapons and skills you can unlock.
On the track there are two different game modes; Race, which is simply get over the finish line first, or Battle, which gives you a certain number of lives to take from the other user. Both versions of the game include weapons though.
The starter pack comes with two cars, which will provide more than enough fun even if you’re playing on your own. You can setup up to four cars on the track at any time, either for multiplayer via multiple iOS devices, or you can set them to control themselves through AI. Then you set the AI’s difficulty from easy, medium or hard.
Don’t take it lightly though, hard is quite difficult and the AI takes some serious concentration to beat.
At the moment Anki Drive is only available on iOS devices including iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It’s compatible with the iPhone 4s and up, iPad 3 and above and all fifth generation iPod Touch devices.
There’s a plan to make the game available on Android in the future but don’t expect it very soon. You can get Anki Drive in the UK at Apple Stores and online from Wednesday 11 June.
We’ve now got one to play around with properly in the office so we’ll be sure to upload a review in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
by jamesp via Featured Articles
Reviewed by Ossama Hashim
on
June 10, 2014
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