Display of 3D Illuminations using Flying Light Specks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 3D illumination display system using swarms of miniature drones called Flying Light Specks (FLSs), capable of rendering static and motion virtual objects in a 3D space.

Contribution

It presents hardware and software architectures along with algorithms for flight path computation, considering battery life and failure rates, to enable dynamic 3D illumination displays.

Findings

ICF technique reduces total drone travel distance.

Effective display of static and motion illuminations demonstrated.

Swarm coordination achieves realistic 3D virtual object rendering.

Abstract

This paper presents techniques to display 3D illuminations using Flying Light Specks, FLSs. Each FLS is a miniature (hundreds of micrometers) sized drone with one or more light sources to generate different colors and textures with adjustable brightness. It is network enabled with a processor and local storage. Synchronized swarms of cooperating FLSs render illumination of virtual objects in a pre-specified 3D volume, an FLS display. We present techniques to display both static and motion illuminations. Our display techniques consider the limited flight time of an FLS on a fully charged battery and the duration of time to charge the FLS battery. Moreover, our techniques assume failure of FLSs is the norm rather than an exception. We present a hardware and a software architecture for an FLS-display along with a family of techniques to compute flight paths of FLSs for illuminations. With motion illuminations, one technique (ICF) minimizes the overall distance traveled by the FLSs significantly when compared with the other techniques.