Can we see attempt #2 now?
Drone drawing? How about pretentious, artless vandalism?
Bansky I like. This, however, is crap, no matter how cool drones are.
I would like to believe that that was not a soundtrack but the actual sound of the graffiti drone in action.
If there were a swarm of them, they did multiple passes, colors, mb some UV inks, or luminescent… and they actually had something interesting to say. This seems to be ‘look Ma I can scrawl on someone else’s canvas!’ and then produce chicken scratch. meh
Tho i love the idea that the drone makes the audio soundtrack while it ‘works’.
The soundtrack was much more interesting than the video, which is, I guess, baby steps?
I was hoping for a mustache.
I was expecting a pre-programmed flight path, sensors to control distance from billboard, etc. Maybe an array of drones working together. Still, cool proof of concept. In the meantime…
The trouble is, it’s not graffiti, which I think uses words and letters and such. It’s still a wonderful idea, very badly executed. It should be possible to include gyro stabilization, accelerometer feedback compensation, and achieve precise enough control to actually write.
That’s the one I want to see!
EDIT: Also proximity sensors, per @Jim_Kirk.
My college included a bunch of artists and a bunch of engineers, and they hardly ever worked together, but when they did the results were genius. This is what they should be perfecting: flying robo-Banksy!
Looks like there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.
Billboards are audiovisual industrial waste being dumped into our input streams without our consent.
I’d consider these areas a fair game for any treatment a mind can come up with.
Sometimes it feels like every free area has to be used for advertising. Like if free space not generating revenue for somebody would be something bad. Like if oversaturation of our environment with loud, shining, colorful buy-this-crap messages is some holy ideal to strive for.
I’d say, more drones like this.
“The idea of it crystallized one day when I was in the supermarket and I swiped my bank card to pay for my groceries, and during the intervals between swiping my card, confirming the amount, and then entering my PIN, well during those intervals I was shown advertisements on the little screen, because some genius had figured out a person in that situation is a captive audience. And that’s when it kinda hit me that a new frontier of capitalism has been opened up, by our self-appointed ‘disruptors’, and it’s one where you win competitive advantage by being the most aggressive in digging up and monetizing every bit of private head space.”
Drone them all.
That’s sweet technology, but that’s one ugly Mona Lisa.
I think billboards are a horrible blight, and I sometimes enjoy clever, well executed billboard pranks. This isn’t one of those. This is like watching someone urinate on a billboard with a remote control penis - and even that would be more clever than the pathetic scrawls the artist did do.
Now, an automated vector graphic system sprayed by drone? Or scanning printer? That could be cool. Again, this pretentious, pathetic crap is not that. Not artistic. Not interesting technology. Not interesting politics. Not interesting anything. Just crap.
It’s just the beginning. You have too high requirements for the one-of-the-first attempt. All that you want will likely come in near future. With computer vision, too.
This is not the first attempt at drone graffiti by a long shot. Were it so I might be more charitable, but it isn’t.
https://www.google.com/search?q=drone+graffiti&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=drone+graffiti&safe=off&tbm=vid
Fine. It’s still an early attempt, and we can expect improvements.
A drone-mounted projector would be neat.
Those lightweight DLP ones with LEDs could be a good beginning.
Thought: what about replacing the LEDs with a photoflash? We’d then have an image that lasts only a fraction of second, but is bright, in small package and low enough energy demand to be able to be fed from a not-prohibitively-heavy battery for quite a number of flashes.
Another possibility is using a chemical light source, a magnesium flare. I’d pair this rather with a gobo projector than with an expensive DLP, but it should work too; I’d suggest this however for ground-based disposable static-message projectors.
Maybe a decollimated green laser would work too?
Yeah, but it’s only a prototype. Imagine tens or hundreds of thousands of tubes and a vast array of CMYK paintballs.
