But there was more buzzing around the park that day than just his quadcopter. The pilots there were stoked ?about a secret project Shen had been working on for months: the world's first-ever Nerf-disc shooting drone.

Late last month, Shen finally got the ?production model of his Blast quadcopter, and he agreed to let us test it out in an empty warehouse in Brooklyn (it's been too windy and miserable in New York to fly outdoors).

The Blast is early tech, sure, but it signals where drones are going. When Shen and rival racer and drone designer Ryan Gury spoke to us last time, they hinted that racing was just the first part of what would become a new sport.