A company that makes accessories for cellphones wants to add something else to the endless list of things you can do with an iPhone: fly a toy helicopter.
At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week, Paris-based Parrot unveiled its AR.Drone — a plastic and foam helicopter that is about one-third of a meter long and can be remotely controlled from the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch. The copter connects to the iPhone over Wi-Fi and is equipped with two cameras: one on its belly to calculate its speed and another on its nose that streams its field of vision back to the phone’s screen.
Parrot also plans to release games that meld the real world seen by the AR.Drone with “augmented reality.” That means the helicopter could appear to be fighting virtual objects such as robots on the iPhone’s screen.
Meanwhile, Research In Motion (RIM) has rolled out a BlackBerry Presenter that business “road warriors” can use to give PowerPoint presentations from the Canadian company’s popular smartphones.
“If you do PowerPoint presentations, you can leave the laptop behind,” RIM director of public relations Shelly Sofer said after pulling a Presenter from a jacket pocket. “We see the use of this for the road warrior, and it can be left in a corporation board room so anyone can go in and do a presentation without having to pull out cables or mess with resolution.”
A Presenter device, about the size of a deck of cards, is plugged into a projector and then controlled wirelessly by a BlackBerry.
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