GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

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Parrot’s AR.Drone looks like any other four-bladed, foam*-framed remote-control quadricopter. But inside it’s packed to the gills with electronics that make it far more sophisticated than most.

“The AR. Drone is earth-shattering,” gushes iFixit, which disassembled the drone after testing it. “It has blown away every drone expert we’ve talked to. It’s not just a toy: it’s a phenomenal piece of engineering that manages to solve some very difficult software problems in order to take flight.”

Start with the controller: Instead of using a pair of joysticks, the AR.Drone utilizes an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app, which optionally lets you steer the drone via its onboard VGA camera. It’s a bit like you were a tiny little homunculus, sitting inside the drone, peering out at the world through its wide-angle lens.

Inside, the drone’s circuit boards sport a 16-bit microprocessor, an ARM CPU, Wi-Fi module, memory, and a gyroscope. It also has an ultrasound altimeter that helps the drone stay stable up to 6 meters above ground. The four brushless motors propel the rotors in opposite directions (two go clockwise, two go counter-clockwise) at up to 41,400 RM.

Its 1,000 mAh battery will last for about 10 minutes. That’s more than enough time to play virtual reality games, zip around the house terrorizing your siblings, or take a quick aerial recon flight above your house.

We saw a demo of the Parrot AR.Drone at CES (video link), and we’re happy to see it’s now on the market. It’ll cost you, though: One drone is $300. And you’ll need two (plus two iPhones) if you want to play the augmented-reality first-person shooter shown in the video below.

* technically it’s expanded polypropylene (EPP).

Photos courtesy iFixit.

An award-winning writer specializing in technology, science and business, Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world’s smallest magazine.
Follow @dylan20 and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

You’re a photographer: Imagine being able not only to walk around your subject, but to whisk yourself away and shoot from anywhere you choose, however high your want, like James Cameron guiding his virtual cameras in Avatar. With Anthony Jacobs’ new autonomous camera-copter, you can.

The new rig is the sequel to the HD video-camera we saw swept into the skies of New York by a remote-controlled quadrocopter last year. Jacobs, the photographer and inveterate tinkerer behind that setup, is back, and this time he’s using GPS and lifting video-shooting DSLRs into the air. Jacobs is pitching this new platform at photojournalists, and here’s why:

Say you are on the ground at a natural disaster site (or perhaps BP’s heavies are trying to prevent you from grabbing your shot). You fire up the four-rotor copter and fly your camera into position. Hit a switch and the GPS-control kicks in. Combined with the inherent stability of a quadrocopter and its gyroscopes, the platform stays exactly where it is, even in wind.

The photographer can now drop the remote and concentrate on taking photos or video. A live video-feed is sent back from the camera to an 8-inch LCD-screen for composition, and a three-axis gimbal, controlled by another remote, allows the camera to be swung independently into position. This allows the photographer to capture shots otherwise impossible to get, or too dangerous to shoot by hand. It could also give amazing perspectives on sports games (although we guess it could all be brought down by an unlucky football).

And when you’re done, you just hit the “home” button and the camera will fly itself right back to you. But there’s more: Are you an indie-filmmaker looking to add some expensive looking boom-shots and fly-bys to your movie? Check this out:

With one person piloting and the other working the camera, this is a lot cheaper than renting a helicopter. For the photojournalist working alone, the whole thing packs into a single Pelican case, making it portable and tough enough to take anywhere. As Jacobs says in the email he sent me, “I believe this [...] would make a lot of readers drool!” He’s dead right.

Canon 5D Mark II Aerial Drone – Autonomous GPS Position Hold [Perpective Aerials. Thanks, Anthony!]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If you’re using both hands to play a musical instrument, the last thing you want to worry about is turning the pages of sheet-music as you play. The traditional solution was to make somebody do it for you, or to quickly reach up and do it yourself.

Tech has helped. These days a laptop with a USB foot-pedal is the way to go, but there have been all manner of spring-loaded and hydraulic contraptions invented to turn actual paper pages. These were, as you might expect, less than reliable.

Airturn, maker of sheet-music-reading software and hardware, has come up with a solution for the iPad. Apple’s tablet would seem to be the perfect device for reading music: it’s big enough to replace a piece of paper, whilst still slim and light enough to put on a music stand. Combined with Airturn’s new Bluetooth foot-switch, it makes a reliable, wire-free and practical solution.

The BT-105, as it is called, has a pair of switches, one to page forward, and one to page back. The switch doesn’t just work with the company’s own software, either. The video demo shows it controlling a third-party app with a zoom feature. In this case, the switch can tell the app to flip half a page at a time or, more accurately, to show the second half of the page before it flips to the next one.

The switch is in development right now, but should be available in the last quarter of this year.

iPad Bluetooth page turner footswitch prototype [Airturn. Thanks, Hugh!]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews