MIT's Flyfire To Paint Images In the Sky Using Micro-Helicopters 65
@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."
Batman? (Score:2, Funny)
Links to project site and video (Score:1, Informative)
project site: http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/ [mit.edu]
video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnEN9B18v6Q [youtube.com]
Deliciously exciting?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then, of course, the telephone's such a _convenient_ thing; it just sits there and _demands_ you call someone who doesn't want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn't any time of my own. When it wasn't the telephone it was the television, the radio, the phonograph. When it wasn't the television or radio or the phonograph it was motion pictures at the corner theater, motion pictures projected, with commercials on low-lying cumulus clouds. It doesn't rain rain any more, it rains soapsuds.
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Dude, think about it (Score:2)
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Yep, my thoughts exactly
Q. What purpose would this technology serve?
A. Joe Camel floating high above in 3D over our schools recruiting new customers to the ranks.
They my even be able to personalize this one day Minority Report fashion
" Joe slashdot geek, would you like a virtual prostitute today? Or maybe rent one of our new sexbots"
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I'm from Tennessee, and people around here enjoy many amateur engineering projects involving projectiles. You may have heard of something called a "potato gun."
I have a feeling free-floating billboards would spark a resurgence in their popularity.
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Don't worry. It won't work.
These things need power to keep flying. Currently the best batteries in terms of power/weight ratio are li-po. Li-po batters give you about 10 minutes flying time with a small chopper similar in size and weight to these things. Of course these will actually draw more power than that for the bright LEDs and more complex sensor/telemetry system.
Oh, and li-po batteries have some nasty problems. If you overcharge or try to draw too much power from them too quickly they explode. The pl
So when they paint them black (Score:2)
Great for sports! (Score:3, Interesting)
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buzz kill. pay no attention to the rack sized power supply behind the curtain.
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turn the goal posts into Tesla coils and voila!
Yes this sounds like a wonderful way to reduce our idiot problem here in the states.
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kill yourself
Only if I can drag you to hell with me AC.
We all know that's the only way anyone has ever won the game.
Induction (Score:2)
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I see Macy's (or rather, the company(s) that do their fourth of july stuff) as being a huge customer and early adopter.
Already been done... (Score:5, Funny)
Why reinvent the wheel? Trying to put sheep out of business? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw [youtube.com]
-Randy
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You forgot 'annoying as f**k' (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, because a 300ft coke ad hovering in the sky above my house is going to be exhilarating...
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Especially when the swarm notices that you've learned to ignore it so it swoops down to 10 feet above your head.
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The hot exhaust-laden air has made me rather parched. What beverage might I consume that would relieve such thirst? I do believe I've seen the name of one such product very recently? Battery acid? No. Horse urine? Nope. Oh, yeah, an only slightly more revolting beverage - printed on the billboard hovering 10 feet above my head - Coca Cola.
Nah, I think I'll just shoot down the leader and all the others will follow. Then I'll go have a glass of water and retain the integrity of my skeletal structure.
why ignore? shoot it down (Score:2)
Buy our Ad Blocking mini attack helicopter now!
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This.
Accurate submeter 3D positioning is quite hard.
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Accurate submeter 3D positioning is quite hard.
Hard but solved [csiro.au].
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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.
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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.
easy display (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Problems with airflow? (Score:1)
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It's not just the downdraft below them. Think about it. You have a fluid (air) That is being sucked downward creating a pressure difference. High pressure below, and low pressure above. This will be offset by a flow of air around the blades and upward. A diagram would look a lot like a torus [wikipedia.org].
There will be a downdraft that they will need to account for, but I don't think it will go very far. There will also be an updraft to the sides that they will need to adjust for. In other words, they can't get t
Wind anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds familiar (Score:1)
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...
Oh The Horror (Score:5, Funny)
Short Battery Life (Score:1)
And I thought geese were a problem! (Score:1)
Terrorist attack! (Score:2)
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.
Pretty cool but seems like over kill for a display (Score:1)
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. Lar
Leave it to MIT... (Score:2)
To spend lots of time talking about how cool their idea is, without actually doing it.
Please excuse the vulgarity of my comment, but (Score:2)
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.
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I just want to buy some milk for my son at the grocery store
Get a cow? Although, it looks like you already tried to apt-get one...
This is Awesome. (Score:2)
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.
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MIT already did that three years ago [mit.edu], albeit in smaller scale.
Cosmos (Score:2)