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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!
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.
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.
Accurate submeter 3D positioning is quite hard.
--why?
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.
Aside from stabilization, I think the bigger problem they will have is the duration of flight. By the time they get the helicopter matrix up and stabilized they will all need to land and recharge. And if there is no self docking mechanism to recharge, you will need an army of people to plug the things in when they come raining down.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Individual units do not need to stay in the one absolute place. They need to stay in one place relative to the entire formation only. The formation can move around quite a bit.
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.
I guess you'll never start a challenging project then.
Accurate submeter 3D positioning is quite hard.
Hard but solved.
MIT already did that three years ago, albeit in smaller scale.
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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.