Real FX Racing is Throwback With 21st Century Smarts

What's This?

Image: Wow Stuff

By Lance Ulanoff2014-06-27 11:18:30 UTC

As a kid, I owned a slot racing set. It might have been this one. Despite the hard-to-assemble black plastic and metal track and extremely finicky motorized cars, I loved it the way only a seven year old could.

In recent years, the toy racing game has changed, a lot. There are a variety of sexy RC-style cars that you can control with your iPhone or iPad and a new generation of intelligent, even robotic cars like Anki that, while still relying on a remote control (usually the iPhone), can actually drive themselves around the track and even actively try to beat the other robot cars.

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Then there’s Wow! Stuff Lab's Real FX racing kit. It manages to combine robotic- or artificial intelligence with an old-school racing appeal, thanks to a more traditional controller and its unique, patented track system.

Real FX Racing, which I took for a test run at the CEWeek event in New York City, doesn’t rely on smartphone or apps. Instead, the 6-inch-long, AAA battery-powered cars have sensors that read and run on a specially patterned track. The track keeps the car from driving off and also tells it where and how to steer. If that was all it did, though, Real FX would be a real snooze.

The kit, which is currently on Kickstarter, includes two physical controllers that communicate with the cars via 2.4 Ghz radio band and allow you to control speed and steering and actually work in tandem with the car’s drive assist. The controller's large steering mechanism, which looks like a racing car tire, gives you partial steering control, so you can, for example, find the inside lane on a straightaway or pull close to the inside edge on a tight turn. It also features a speed control trigger on the bottom, which, unlike the steering, will let you fully control the speed of your car. You do need to use two hands to race.

The track, which is flat as paper and comes in roughly 1-ft long pieces, snaps together easily and can be configured pretty much however you want.

In my test drive, I initially had a habit of driving right off the track, usually because I was going too fast around the turns and Real FX purposely won’t stop you from doing that. The remote includes a button that gives you total control of steering so you can effectively drive back to the track. I used this a few times. If you push the speed control forward, you can drive backwards, too.

As I noted, the cars are smart, but a there’s also a lot of interaction and intelligence on the Real FX remotes. They provide the race sounds and let you add racing elements like a pace car, a virtual race opponent and even virtual hazards like oil slicks.

As for the track pieces, you get 12 with the initial kit of two cars and two controllers. One section includes a pit area. The cars will recognize this pit as they drive by it and if you never drive into it, the car’s performance will slowly degrade.

Wow!’s Director Dr. Graeme Taylor told me that they’re also building in some extensibility. The car bodies, for example, can be removed to reveal a mini USB port on the chassis, which they will eventually use to add smart car bodies shells with more sensors and maybe interaction (like shooting virtual rockets at other cars).

As for my experience, it was remarkably familiar. The controller, though a bit large, reminded me of the kind I used to use with old-school slot racing systems. The cars handled similarly, driving as if there were slots on the track even though there weren’t any. $150 might be a bit much to pay for the whole system, but I see the potential and am ready to race again.

Wow! Stuff Labs expects to ship Real FX Racing by the end of September.

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Topics: Gadgets, racing, remote control, Tech, toys