Motherboard

If gesture computing just aren’t doing it for you, have you ever considered a screen made of micro-helicopters? MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and Aerospace Robotics Embedded Systems Laboratory (ARES Lab) have, naturally. Flyfire is, essentially, a flying cloud of mini helicopters that individually act as LED pixels, and together create an eye-blowingly new three dimensional display that can transform from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape.

If we ever watched Lost, this is how we might have to do it.

BLDGBLOG thinks of better uses, like “emergency streetlights, future TV, avant-garde rural entertainment, and even acts of war.”

Imagine web-browsing through literal clouds of small flying pixels, parting and weaving in the air in front of you like fireflies (or imagine training fireflies to act as a web browser). You’re in a university auditorium one day when, instead of delivering her projected slideshow, your professor simply remote-controls a whirring vortex of ten thousand flying micro-dots. Digital 3D cinema is nothing compared to this murmuration of light.
Channeling Tim Maly, we might even someday see a drone-swarm of LED-augmented, artificially intelligent nano-helicopters flying off into the desert skies of the American southwest, on cinematic migration routes blurring overhead. On a lonely car drive through northern Arizona when a film-cloud flies by…

This isn’t science fiction—recent advances in battery technology and wireless control have helped make Flyfire possible (though I think it’s safe to say this screen isn’t Energy Star-rated). As impressive as it sounds, forgive us if the notion of swarms of pixels doesn’t conjure up images of technological utopia. This sympathetic description doesn’t really help: “It aims to be a step towards ‘smart dust’— the idea that computing is becoming increasingly smaller, addressable, pervasive – and persuasive.” You know, for those PowerPoint presentations that will really kill them.