A new generation of flying toys
Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th-century vision of mechanical flight apparently never included fixed wings assisted by propellers or jet engines. His chief inspiration was birds, reflected in drawings picturing a flying machine fashioned to stay aloft by flapping its wings.
More than 500 years later, WowWee, a robotics and entertainment products company, shares that vision. Next month it plans to release a mass-produced, functional ornithopter, a device that flies in birdlike fashion in this case, a radio- controlled toy that mechanically flaps its Mylar wings.
The inspiration besides Leonardo’s work is an insect, said Sean Frawley, the 22-year-old inventor of the toy, the FlyTech Dragonfly.
“People have been experimenting all around the world with these kinds of things,” Frawley, an aerospace engineering graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida and project manager for WowWee, said in an interview by telephone from the company’s office in Hong Kong.
During demonstration flights of the Dragonfly last month at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual technology showcase in Las Vegas, the fluttering, footlong bug was an enormous hit. Throngs of onlookers clamored for a chance to buy the $50 toy on the spot. At the time, none were for sale.
The robotic dragonfly will take flight again at the American International Toy Fair, the largest toy trade show in the Western Hemisphere, which begins Sunday in New York.
But it will hardly be alone there in its use of technologies that are giving a new generation of toys extraordinary capabilities to fly, float, walk and roll almost always inexpensively in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.
“Is there a revolution?” asked Gene Khasminsky, the design director for Interactive Toy Concepts, the Canadian-based maker of the Micro Mosquito ($70), a palm-sized, radio-controlled helicopter that was in great demand among holiday toy shoppers.
“I think, right now, that there is a push back from our industry to get kids off the couch where they’re playing video games,” Khasminsky said by telephone from his office in Toronto. “We’re moving into an age where toys are becoming more high-tech to stay competitive with gaming.”
He suggested that navigating well- designed vehicles in the physical world like the company’s inventory of remote-controlled helicopters, planes and helium blimps is vastly more compelling than steering a virtual vehicle in a computer-generated universe.
Executives at Mattel, which owns Tyco, are placing their bets on a new kind of radio-controlled three- wheeled vehicle it is calling the Tyco R/C Terrainiac. Scheduled to go on sale in the summer for about $80, the Terrainiac is a futuristic-looking vehicle powered by a single rear wheel that is actually a complex treaded ball, referred to by its makers as a “sphere drive.”
The body of the vehicle has been engineered with a controllable joint that allows the Terrainiac to pivot or twist like a human torso. The results are radical turns at high speed as its high- torque electric motor drives the vehicle over practically any sort of terrain, thus its name.
But George Benz, director of marketing for Tyco Radio Control, said the toy would not be limited to solid surfaces. The sphere drive is hollow, helping to provide buoyancy as well as locomotion when the Terrainiac takes to the water.
“The tricky part of development is making these toys have tremendous performance on land and really deliver when it gets wet,” he said.
WowWee, whose previous creations include the robotic toy Robosapien, is also working on a radio-controlled vehicle for release this year that walks on four spidery, multijointed legs. It is called Roboquad and is expected to cost $100.
And Wild Planet Entertainment, which makes a line of “spy toys for any mission” under the rubric Spy Gear, had added a surveillance wrinkle to a rather conventional remote-controlled vehicle. Its Spy Video Car ($140 at www.wildplanet.com) has a front- mounted camera that wirelessly transmits a live video image that can be viewed in an eyepiece.
“A separate transmitter in the car transmits the video over a 2.4 megahertz frequency like a wireless phone uses,” explained Shannon Bruzelius, the product integrity engineer at Wild Planet, which operates research and development centers in San Francisco and Hong Kong.
He said the company planned to add a $15 Mobile Spy Ear vehicle (not remotely controlled) equipped with a microphone and an amplifier that can wirelessly beam sounds up to 75 feet, or 23 meters, to an earbud the user wears.
But of all the innovations brimming in toy vehicles these days, the most startling have been reserved for those that achieve flight.