This is a flying machine unlike anything you've ever seen before. It's not an airplane, it's not a helicopter, it's not an autogyro, it's not an ornithopter with flapping wings. It's a powered maple seed. I'd have never thought of it, and you probably wouldn't have either, but the Wowwee designers did, and they deserve lots of credit for this masterpiece of out-of-the-box thinking.
I read about it in the magazine of an engineering society that I belong to, and the reviewer couldn't figure out what kind of "control equation" allowed an object with no non-rotating reference elements -- everything on the Bladestar spins -- to operate under directed flight. He must have come from the same aeronautical tradition as the ones that proved that a bumblebee can't fly. (We now know that insects use nonlinear "unsteady flows" to gain more lift than traditional aerodynamic equations provide for.)
While the Bladestar employs "AI" according to its advertising, it's not as smart as a bumblebee. But it can successfully avoid light-colored objects under good conditions. In the jargon of AI research this is called situationist autonomous control. If the room you're flying it in has dark walls like my living room, you'll have to guide it away from them yourself. The blades do collect dings if you fly it into hard objects, but the wingtips are covered with heavy foil that you can smooth out and it's nearly as good as new.
It naturally hovers very stably, so you might expect it to respond to the controls like a UFO in a video game, but no, this is a real flying object with gyroscopic effects when it tilts to move sideways. It takes a little bit of practice to learn to anticipate these movements and coordinate the controls appropriately. I was practicing landing on target after about 5 flights.
