Make children envious with a pair of Segway “roller skates”
Plus, take a virtual-reality adventure and produce a radio show on your phone
By Tim Martin
Segway Drift W1 £359 shop.segway.com Not as terrifying to master as they look, these foot-sized gadgets are essentially Segway electric hoverboards shrunk down to the size of roller skates. Take your position on their self-balancing platforms, shift your weight forward to advance or back to reverse, draw a polite veil over your introductory spills and you’ll soon be trundling along on glimmering cyberpunk wheels. A three-hour charge offers just 45 minutes of travel (on flat dry ground, please) and they’re currently illegal on British public roads. But such cavils fade away when you are whizzing through the park, followed by admiring eyes and children pleading for a go. Don’t let them! They’ll be better than you in seconds.
Astro Bot: Rescue Mission PS4, £34.99 Since most consumer virtual reality still requires you to strap a visor to your head and flail about like a drunk alien, it sometimes feels like a technology whose moment will never come. But this endlessly fresh and charming game, designed for Sony’s PSVR hardware, makes the best argument for the technology to date. Your purpose is to guide a cute robot as it leaps and skips through 3D environments – jungle, city, ocean bed. These worlds wrap around the player as well, forcing you to peer around walls, squint up precipices, and duck beneath projectiles as you urge your android on its way. In technical terms, Astro Bot is one of a kind: a delightful experience in immersive gaming.
■Anchor iOS/Android, free This is an uncannily simple podcast-producer-in-a-box app. Anchor distils a forbidding mountain of administrative and editorial tasks into a few touch-screen buttons. You build a library of audio clips by talking into your device or connecting a microphone. Then you incorporate chats with collaborators and drop in songs from Spotify or Apple Music, which play quietly under your voice and mark transitions. Finally you upload the whole thing to a variety of publishing platforms. It’s not clear how Anchor intends to make money from this (currently) free app, but the process is unbeatably concise: the only things you’ll need to provide are your best radio voice, your most polished jokes and your most scintillating subject matter. And you’ve got those already, right? Right?
ILLUSTRATIONS ANDY MARTIN
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