the user’s iPhone or iPad, which doubles as the controller for each car. That meant Sofman and his co-founders were able to add video-game elements to Anki Drive, creating a hybrid product that feels novel.
The toy industry, Sofman argues, has been stagnant since the 1960s; the G.I. Joe and Barbie sets kids play with today are pretty similar to the ones their parents had 40 years ago. “But the industry’s big asset is that toys are real,” Sofman says. “You can touch them and hold them and there is this physical connection you can’t replicate on the screen. On the other side of the fence, though, video games is a pretty amazing industry to watch, because the characters are deep inside a world that expands. It can be different from week to week. And there are always many characters, and their interactions create the diversity of situations and make things fun.” These two industries have been “poking at each other” for a long time, Sofman says, but haven’t really melded.
By the time Sofman, Palatucci, and Tappeiner were starting their moonlighting project, the smartphone revolution was in full swing, providing a way to bridge the gap. “We set out to create this new category where you could literally program video games on top of characters in the real world,” he says.
They decided early on that their characters would be cars. “We love cars,” Sofman says. “There is something everlasting about their appeal to people. Everybody from a 4-year-old to an 80-year-old loves them.”
But it took the better part of four years, from 2008 to 2012, to come up with toy-sized cars that would be nimble, perceptive of their environments, and affordable—and, of course, to write the software needed to make them come alive.
“If you get a really high level of perception of what’s happening in the physical world, you can have a virtual representation of it inside the game,” Sofman says. “That is one of the key enablers. That, plus the motion controller to steer around curves and control drift.” The software also has to compensate for factors like whether the track is on a hardwood floor or a shag carpet; whether there’s dust on the tires; and how much each motor has degraded.
I realize I’m geeking out about the underlying technology, but hey, that’s why you read Xconomy. Now for a word about the game itself. Anki Drive is most enjoyable when two or more people are playing, though one person can play against the AI. Software keeps your car on the track automatically as it circles, but you can maneuver toward the inside or the outside of the track by tilting your iPhone left or right, and speed up or slow down by tilting it forward or backward.
As Sofman demonstrates in this video, you can simply race against competitors, or you can battle them by activating weapons like a railgun or a tractor beam. The cars spin out if they’re hit, and lights and sounds mimic gunfire and explosions. (This isn’t a game for the non-violent.)
The cars come in four different designs, and while the technology inside is the same, they’re programmed with individual personalities and capabilities—Boson is an aggressive attacker, equipped with a gravity beam to slow competitors, while Rho is faster and possesses shields. Then there’s Kourai, the “agile striker,” and Katal, the “aggressive defender.”
Giving the $70 cars individual personalities is a neat (and potentially lucrative) idea. But what makes the game even more interesting is that these personalities evolve over time in response to the human player. Just as in a video game, achievements unlock upgrades like higher top speeds, faster acceleration, and new weapons. Those capabilities are stored in the cars’ own memories, not in the paired devices. Sofman thinks well-trained cars might eventually become tradeable or collectible.
The Anki Drive starter kits and expansion cars went on sale in October, so it’s too early to tell whether the product is going to be a hit, though I’m betting it will be. If it is, Anki’s next challenge will be to prove that it’s got more tricks up its sleeve.
“Toys are a notoriously hit-driven,” Sofman acknowledges. “You don’t know if it’s going to be successful, or if it’s going to be a two-year fad. We are trying to bypass all of that by making sure we are not competing on the same elements that toys traditionally compete on. We are coming to the party with this huge asset of defining everything in software, which makes it possible to use these Web-enabled devices as conduits for more and more depth.”
Already, Anki is working on a new release of the Anki Drive app that provides more character development for the vehicles. And it’s safe to predict that the company will offer more styles of expansion cars and larger, more complex tracks.
But in the end, Anki isn’t a racing-game company. It’s not even a toy company. “I personally feel like we could grow into a really amazing, successful company based purely on entertainment, but that is not the vision,” Sofman says. “We are going to make sure we lead in entertainment, but we are also able to be a general AI and robotics company, where the common theme is the technologies and flavors and approaches we are using, and the ability to have surprising applications in the real world, independent of category or industry.”
Anki has at least one future competitor in its sights already: Bedford, MA-based iRobot, which is known for making cleaning robots for the home, bomb-defusing robots for battlefields, and medical telepresence robots for the clinic. Sofman briefly worked at iRobot before graduate school, and he says Anki is pursuing a wholly different philosophy.
“They are very big on behavioral robotics,” Sofman says. “Rod Brooks [iRobot’s co-founder] was really well known in the 1980s for focusing on simple, instinctual reactions—if you bump something, it makes the robot go in a different direction. The Roomba is a mechanically a beautiful system, but on the AI side it’s just small building blocks of these behavioral reactions. That worked really well when computation was incredibly limited. When you look at applications that require a really deep connection between the system and the environment, with autonomous navigation, it’s more about centralized cognition and thinking about sensor data.”
The best short-term outcome for Anki, Sofman says, would be to succeed so well with the racing game that when the company decides to enter some adjacent market, “we have a lot of capital in terms of our reputation and resources.” Other robotics companies, he says, “make very good mechanical systems—but not with the AI, the supporting intelligence, that understands the environment and makes the products come to life. That feels like a massive opportunity.”
Special thanks to Katelyn Bryant at The Outcast Agency for her videography assistance.
