New Parrot AR.drone games

Parrot, the creators of the AR.Drone quadricopter, announced two upcoming games for the device at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. AR.Race lets pilots set up real-life pylons to fly laps around, competing in real time with another quadricopter or in time trials, and AR.Flying Ace is an augmented reality game that pits two drones in a dogfight against one another.

AR.Race, which was set up as a demo at the show, requires users to establish two vertical pylons to use as obstacles in the race. The demo used inflatable columns, but Henri Seydoux, Parrot’s CEO, told Ars that the pylons could be made of pretty much anything sizeable—trees, telephone poles, or even humans game for having drones whizzing by only inches away. The iOS app creates a starting line to one side of one of the pylons, and players can then guide their drones in circles or figure eights around them, racing to complete two laps.

Unfortunately there was no demo available for AR.Flying Ace, a game that uses the cameras mounted on the drones to display an augmented reality where two drones can shoot each other with machine guns and missiles, aerial-dogfight style. Parrot has put up a trailer of the game on its site, and it looks like a two-sided version of their only released game, AR.Pursuit.

While a game in the style of AR.Flying Ace has been promised to customers for a while now, Seydoux informed us that AR.Race will be available first in a few months, with AR.Flying Ace following closely on its heels. Each game will work with the same $300 AR.Drone we reviewed a few months ago, and will be priced at $2.99 in the iTunes App Store.

An AR.Drone flies the mini-course set up for it at CES.