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MIT's Flyfire To Paint Images In the Sky Using Micro-Helicopters
@engadget mentions that a new project dubbed "Flyfire" at MIT is looking to launch a fleet of LED-equipped micro-helicopters and coordinate them in synchrony to create massive floating images. "By using LED-equipped drones the project pledges to build free-floating 3D displays, endowing them with enough smarts and positional awareness to organize themselves into an airborne canvas. It sounds deliciously exciting and challenging."
Maybe this will save on energy costs of using super bright spotlights as Batman beacons.
project site: http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/
video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnEN9B18v6Q
Sounds scary to me... Sounds more like we'll be followed by 'intelligent billboards'!
and they start following me, my theories will be vindicated!
Seiously, free floating, repositional advertising is not anything we need to see. I don't want to have "Coca-Cola" splashed, hovering in the air above Half Dome in Yosemite, or "Shoney's" hovering above the Mt. Rushmore Monument... Let those of us who do manage to get off the couch to escape to the great outdoors enjoy them.
I'd watch Avatar on 3d helicopters. You'd need enough to fill in a football field.
Looks like it would be amazing for sports stadiums. It could even deliver crowd-hyping mascots to various sections of the stadium. I wonder how the power source and recharging issue would be handled, though.
With precise station keeping ability these could be outfitted with small mirrors. Put a thousand or two up and you could have a roving DEATH BEAM harnessing the deadly fusion pumped energy of the sun to fry us all like ants.
Why reinvent the wheel? Trying to put sheep out of business? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw
-Randy
"It sounds deliciously exciting and challenging"
Yeah, because a 300ft coke ad hovering in the sky above my house is going to be exhilarating...
This will be great. Super cool helicopters with lights instead of rockets with explosions. Nerds have now taken over Independence day.
where anything is possible and they have no clue about the amount of work involved. ;)
It seems they are mostly looking at the logistics of how to manage all these devices and make a cool display or whatever. While that is a cool problem to solve, the biggest hurdle they are going to face is getting those damn things to stay in one place. That's the core problem and I don't see that they have solved it, the rest of the stuff is just icing. Unfortunately kids tends to like the icing more than the cake so that's what they're starting with.
Currently it's pretty much impossible with current technology to get even one to stay within a space of 10 cubic feet or so. I can't imagine getting a whole bunch of them to do it. They are so incredibly sensitive to wind and air pressure. Just the motion from nearby units is going to be enough to send the others flying all sorts of directions and that's without the external weather effects.
I sort of wish they would just do it, design the system, build everything and send them up. Imagine watching them all crashing into each other, parts flying everywhere. Would be awesome.
I think they have their work cut out for them. I predict this project won't get very far. In 10 years they will either still be working on it or the project will be dead.
Those robins are always chirp chirp chirpin' away in the spring... wait until they fly into one of these helicopter swarms!
I can hardly wait when the late summer yellowjackets/hornets get annoyed by them and 50 of them attack one of these helicopters.
I guess I'll start carrying around a tennis racket to play "hit the helicopter"
For the 1st physical prototype, they display a waterfall.
Just have them fly 50feet up, and let them malfunction (as expected in the first few prototypes) and fall and call it a success! Now that was easy.
I see two purposes here:
1) Advertising
2) Psychological warfare*
* Many of the places we are fighting are filled with people that I think would freak out if they saw a swarm of these things coming at them.
I'm just thinking they will get problems when trying to fly the helicopters in the airstream from others above them, won't they?
I wonder how long before a gust of wind will disrupt the image...
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Combine this with wireless power (like witricity or the stuff Intel is working on) and you can leave these guys up in the sky for a while. Now line them up and you got a roadway in the sky for your flying car.
In Raymond Khoury's book The Sign some evil doers did almost the exact thing using smart nano particles or something. They used it to scare the hell out of the bible thumpers so they could get them all convinced it was the second coming. Read the book if you want to know how it turns out...
This will be utterly destroyed by an angry mob the first time it gets hacked to display Goatse. Imagine not just disgusting a single person, but an entire football stadium.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Almost the EXACT technology that quite a few conspiracy theorist believe will be employed to spoof the rapture/second coming of Mohammad (apologies, Muslims, if I mistakenly got your beliefs wrong) or pretty much anything else the government/cabal of super-elite rich guys want people to believe in so they can control them? It's call blue something or other... I don't remember much besides it requiring a really advanced form of airborne image projection.
I think we've seen the future of Tool's live shows.
If you've ever played with one of these micro-flyers, you've noticed that the battery life is quite short --- so if they succeed, they won't succeed for long.
Does anybody want to buy my telescope?
More space to run political ads. Just imagine Sarah Palin hovering above your head with unlimited campaign contributions in terms of advertising dollars going towards buying a zillion floating billboards. Remember people, do not panic. You can hurl, just don't panic.
As a private pilot, I look forward to the day when someone plows through a cloud of these things at 125 knots and tests just how many of them it takes to bring down a Cessna - or a 747.
Then I'll go have a glass of water and retain the integrity of my skeletal structure.
And I drink a lot of water, you know. I'm what you might call a water man, Jack - that's what I am. And I can swear to you, my boy, swear to you, that there's nothing wrong with my bodily fluids.
Makes me think it'll have the same destiny as that TV show marketing gimmick where they setup little LED robots giving the finger that scared the bejeezus out of Boston and other cities because you could see the D batteries in it.
This swarm technology is pretty cool, and that aspect of the project has merit. However the idea of using this as a mobile aerial display seems like super over kill. If each unit is a pixel or a few pixels, you need hundreds or thousands flying all together, and able to hold station in the wind, imagine recovering them all for charging, loss from crashes...etc.
If you want a mobile aerial display it would be much cheaper and easier to do something like what was used in the opening of the Winter Olympics. Large hanging matrices of LED's. For bonus points use several in a stack to create the 3d effect. Hang all of this from a remote blimp, and you have a much cheaper, less technically challenging and stable platform for an outdoor aerial display capable of 3d images.
I know most of us will be thinking about all the broken flying devices would be left littering the country-side because these things failed to adapt, but I can't wait until they're upgraded to cary loads greater than theirselves. It would be neat to see some even have an apparent class-system difference, how some have guns to fight-off birds attacking their formations, while others have arms that can link-up to some that are semi-broken in their stearing ability as to only embrace their battery apparatus for moar powah.
To spend lots of time talking about how cool their idea is, without actually doing it.
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FUCK airborne advertisements.
And while we're on the subject, fuck public billboard ads, fuck the impulse isle when I just want to buy some milk for my son at the grocery store, and fuck every other invasive, "can't look away" advertising schemes ever invented. I'm so sick of being plundered by the commercial industry.
Is it too much to ask to look up, knowing you'll see the sky and not a Nike commercial? Jesus Christ.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I have a theory: landing pads that charge by induction! No need to have a human plug the thing in. No need to land so precisely that electrical contact is made. With enough charging stations, you could rotate units in and out much like the players on the field. (or bench. You get the idea.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Buy our Ad Blocking mini attack helicopter now!
Those MIT guys and gals should get together with this guy-
http://vimeo.com/6194911
His heli uses GPS and can automatically fly to any desired point. It can lift a decent payload too.
Pretty much all there is to say.
Science-Fiction writers used to go on about how we'd have giant holographs... turns out you can just use physically floating objects and paint images far more easily. Whoa.
How long before someone makes the Dark Mark?
Finally we have a solution to the issue of light pollution inhibiting our view of the cosmos. Now we can simulate the starry night sky using tiny floating LED-clad robots.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Driving around hunting these down with an emp canon.