Hot Wheels has excelled at merging the real and virtual worlds for the past few years, but a lot of that has really been focused on the driving experience. Specifically, how to make it more like a video game with toys like Hot Wheels AI, Mindracers and Augmoto. This year the brand is finally giving budding gear heads some love with its new TechMods set, an app-controlled vehicle that you build yourself and then control with your phone. It's not the same as tinkering under a hood, but it is actually fun to put together. The kit comes with a plastic chassis, which consists of a battery, a motor and four wheels, two of which can be steered. There's a plastic frame that snaps onto the top of it, with the rest of the vehicle's body made up of pre-cut plastic pieces that you punch out of several sheets and fold according to the in-app instructions.

The National Toy Hall of Fame left a pantheon of classic playthings out of history's toy box this week when the latest inductees were announced in upstate New York. The Clue board game and the Wiffle Ball, both five-time finalists, were inducted into the hall of fame on Thursday at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester along with a shocker: The simple paper airplane. That brings the hall's total to 65 toys, including classics such as the Rubik's Cube, Easy-Bake Oven and Silly Putty as well as stranger picks like the stick, cardboard box and blanket. A few favorites like Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots, Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have come close but failed to make the cut. Others like Trivial Pursuit, Tickle Me Elmo and backgammon have never even been finalists.

Hot Wheels will be celebrating its 50th anniversary soon and, even in an era where kids spend a lot of time on smartphones and tablets, they also still play with little die-cast metal vehicles on plastic orange track. But the venerable toy car brand can also be found on handheld devices, making its entry into AR earlier this year with Track Builder, which allowed users to build their own Hot Wheels setup in simulated space by moving their phone around. Last holiday season the company also brought video game mechanics into the real world with Hot Wheels AI, which put computer-controlled cars onto a real track with virtual pitfalls. With their newest product Mindracers, Hot Wheels and Osmo have flipped that dynamic around. Now those metal cars can be dropped into virtual worlds to race, the kind of places kids used to only see in their imagination. Osmo is best known for its line of learning toys that combine physical play and an iPad: A mirror is clipped at the top of a vertically-propped iPad running the app, allowing it to see blocks and other toy shapes that are placed on the table below.

A few years ago, the startup Anki impressed the crowd at an Apple event by showing off some toy race cars with AI capability baked in. One wouldn't expect the toy-car giant Hot Wheels to sit back and let a little startup do donuts all over its turf, right? First, the similarities between this system and Anki's: Both use specially encoded tracks and infrared sensors under each car to guide the vehicles around the course. In Hot Wheels AI, you can race against the "computer" or another human; in the computer-driven mode, the cars will just stay on the road no matter what. Like the second-generation Anki Overdrive package, Hot Wheels' tracks are modular, and you can piece together your own courses out of 20 included pieces.