Swarm of tiny illuminated helicopters as flying display screen?

MIT researchers are exploring whether a swarm of tiny helicopters outfitted with LEDs could self-organize into a massive flying display "screen." The vision for the nascent Flyfire project is that each of the choppers acts as a pixel to form a dynamically-reconfigurable display.

Flyfiremonanananana

From MIT's SENSEable City Lab, co-developers of the Flyrire project:

With the self-stabilizing and precise controlling technology from the ARES Lab, the motion of the pixels is adaptable in real time. The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience.

Flyfire serves as an initial step to explore and imagine the possibilities of this free-form display: a swarm of pixels in a space.

Flyfire

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Anonymous

i have no idea what just happened. but it sure was cool!
boomer6966

Art? Maybe. Advertising, definately gonna happen. After all research projects need funding too.
Anonymous

This is going to put the hard-working skywriters of America out of business. Good-bye economy.
Aloisius

Super neat, but… what about wind?
- alowishus
  
  Wind? You could just use an evolutionary program and let the little buggers sort it out themselves after a few generations of replication. Wait . . . .
dagfooyo

What a great idea! Of course once they perfect 2-d displays there’s no reason not to expand the copters into 3 dimensions. Then if they can miniaturize this technology it could eventually become a screenless three-dimensional free-floating display. You wave your hand through and it scatters the image which then slowly reforms. So awesome.
Super Nate

Finally! Voxel porn flying 24hrs/day over the regions with the strictest “community standards.” Be still my beating heart.
obdan

“I’ve got one word for you…plastics.”
whatwouldjanedo

They should talk to North Korea. http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-3-of-3
Anonymous

I see very scary weapons in the not-too-distant future.
Anonymous

Someones gonna have a lot of fun picking those out of the sky from a concealed location.
friendpuppy

It’s not really self-organizing though, is it?
Anonymous

What capacity power source are they using for the copters? How long can they fly?
Anonymous

Can’t wait to see what the demoscene can do with this.
Marcel

U.S.A., your drones have a new enemy.
Anonymous

one word…WIND
Anonymous

All I can think of watching this is Vultan and the Hawkmen writing ‘Thanks Flash’ in the sky at the end of Flash Gordon.
pinup57

Please don’t. Stop this. It’s a really cool idea, but in less than no time we’ll have f******g adds in the sky, everywhere, in any place. Please leave it alone. Don’t do it. Please please please.
Nevermore

I want to see this with trained, flying squid.
Anonymous

Until a gust of wind (or a kid with a pellet gun) knocks two of them together, and they plummet out of the sky into somebody’s face, and the product is sued out of existence.
Anonymous

All that aside (collisions, control, wind…) what about power? I’m lucky to get a 3 minute flight out of the remote control micro copter I now have, let alone adding a light source and MORE electronics to adjust color and brightness… would they automatically land in a recharge station and get replaced by fully recharged ones on the fly. (no pun intended) Maybe Tesla coil wireless electric recharging?
rochrobb

I’m skeptical that the computer animation shown here is a fair representation of the ‘reality’ of a swarm of small illuminated helicopters. I don’t think the animation was done in a manner where the dots of light wouldn’t pass through each other, much less preventing collisions of their imaginary rotors. And wouldn’t the backwash from one rotor affect the stability of another?
Anonymous

Rather than helicopters, wouldn’t it be ALOT simpler to use fiber optics whose length could be changed? It should be pretty easy to do a surface, like those pin array toys that you lose interest in after you’ve transfered an image of your face, and your hand flipping the bird. Would be good for 3d maps anyway.
LeFunk

Swarm of tiny illuminated self organized helicopters displaying a goatse.
TheWo0kie

All that aside (collisions, control, wind…) what about power? I’m lucky to get a 3 minute flight out of the remote control micro copter I now have, let alone adding a light source and MORE electronics to adjust color and brightness… would they automatically land in a recharge station and get replaced by fully recharged ones on the fly. (no pun intended) Tesla coil wireless electric recharging?
Anonymous

Wow, we are trying to get two or three micro UAVs to avoid each other in a room and now MIT wants hundreds, if not thousands, of them? It is a cool idea and probably doable in the future, but that is far off into the future.
Anonymous

Imagine all the fun you could have messing with the heads of UFO hunters.
dculberson

The energy source (or energy storage) isn’t available to keep these in the air for more than a few dozen seconds. And it probably won’t be for decades or more.
Anonymous

There’s already an organic version…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw
Dave Faris

Would it require dozens of radio frequency channels to function, or would each one receive all the computer controlled signals, and only respond to the one for their address in the array?
Anonymous

it’s all fun and games until someone looses an eye
Anonymous

Wouldn’t the blades of each minicopter, or at least the axial support shaft for the blades, interfere with the visibility of any light source (LS) situated behind them relative to the viewer?
kalban

I think this would work really well as a replacement for firework shows. High in the sky you could do really cool things with mosaic images that wouldn’t require them to be particularly close together. That would help negate the wind, or at least bring it down to what fireworks have to deal with now (no shows in storms). It would also allow the individual units to be larger, so they could have longer power sources. If they could keep them going for an hour and sync them to music, they would have a re-usable replacement for the $100,000 fireworks displays that cities seem to always have going on for their special events. Bonus: no dealing with explosives for simple entertainment. (Possibly a minus, depending on your perspective.)
oheso

3D clacker projector FTW!
aaron138

Very, very disappointing for MIT.
This is an obvious idea, weâ€™ve talked about it for years and funnily enough weâ€™ve never done it.
It seems all theyâ€™ve done is make a video of what they havenâ€™t done. Canâ€™t even find one real computer controlled helicopter referenced in their web site.
Remember when science was about making stuff not talking about it. (Thatâ€™s supposed to be called SciFi)
- Anonymous
  
  Got to agree with Aaron130. We used to talk about this notion all the time in our lab and I’m sure that our two groups weren’t the only ones who thought of doing this.
  
  But most research groups aren’t in the habit of releasing digital animations of ideas to the press in lieu of prototypes. You actually have to build something to earn scientific credibility.