Game: Anki Drive

Imagine this: a mobile racing game that uses a physical track and physical cars that you can place right down on the floor of your living room, and control everything that's going on in front of you through an app on your iPhone. Oh yeah, and the cars can shoot weapons and wipe each other off the tracks in real life as well, and the machines themselves even get smarter the more that you play. It sounds like something you'd see in a movie about what the future of video games could one day hold, doesn't it?Well guess what? It turns out that such an imaginative game actually exists. It's called Anki Drive, and it's coming out next week to change everything you thought you knew about mobile games. I recently had a chance to speak with Mark Palatucci, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Anki, and Hanns Tappeiner, Co-Founder and President at Anki, to find out just how their innovative studio was able to bring the technical world of robotics into the mobile games space for a truly unique consumer experience.The building blocks for Anki Drive were first put in place over six years ago, when a few PhD students at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute began drafting up ways that robotics technologies could be taken out of the labs and brought into people's lives as consumer products. But of course, the first biggest stumbling block was the cost: most robotics equipment was traditionally far too expensive to sell to the average consumer. But as the overall hardware of the technology world began to get cheaper over the years, the idea of a "mobile game in the real world" that was powered by robotics became much more conceivable. However, Anki would still need to deal with the challenge of creating a robotics product that could work 100% of the time in people's homes with uncontrolled conditions, and outside of the contained lab environment.