Written by: Ian Markowitz

The way CES is set up, it is sprawled across 4 floors of the Las Vegas Convention Center as well as a significant portion of the conference rooms at the Venitian, but what many people, myself included, often overlook is the Central Plaza at CES. There isn’t much to be found there as this year it was mostly Sprint promoting their new 4G coverage and Best Buy promoting their products and the useless Geek Squad. However, had I skipped over the Central Plaza, I wouldn’t have seen Parrot’s new AR.Drone.

Parrot AR.Drone (Photo provided by Parrot)

You may think you’ve seen this at Brookstone or Sharper Image during the holidays, but let me assure you, you haven’t seen this. The AR.Drone is piloted using an iPhone or iPod Touch and by moving the iPhone/iPod Touch similar to a joystick you control the aircraft’s movement. On top of that, the AR.Drone has two cameras built into it, one mounted on the front and one mounted underneath to assist with landings.

The front mounted camera streams its video feed to the iPhone or iPod touch controlling it at a frame rate of 15 frames per second. This device just rekindles the kid in me and although they weren’t letting the average laypeople play with the drone or discussing pricing as the device is still a prototype, I can see the drone being a lot of fun to play with as it essentially gives you your own UAV(unmanned aerial vehicle) to play with.

Parrot AR.Drone (Photo provided by Parrot)

Unfortunately the drone is only capable of 15 minutes of play time at present, but would still be more than enough time to have fun with. Another downside is right now the drone is controlled over Wi-Fi so the range of the drone is limited to the range of the Wi-Fi communication.

Where the device truly shines though is its implementation of augmented reality technology to make the drone as much of a toy as it is a video game. Using the drone’s on-board camera and processor, you can set up a video game where the drone can fire virtual ammunition at a real life target (your econ professor for example) and the drone can interact with its environment. Additionally, Parrot is making the drone open source and releasing a SDK so that developers can create their own augmented reality games for the device.

Ian can be reached at markowi_ian (AT) bentley.edu

FULL DISCLOSURE: Parrot lists on their website that STMicroelectronics is one of  component suppliers. The authors father is employed by STMicroelectronics and while it is unknown whether STMicroelectronics components are part of the droid, this was mentioned in the interest of full disclosure.