Deep beneath a North London bookshop, in the shell of an abandoned theatre, four screens are flying in perfect synch, weaving themselves around the dancer Zakiya Wellington. Each screen flickers with graphics, flooding the subterranean stage with light.
The video – directed by the San Francisco-based designer Bradley G Munkowitz – has been a long time coming. Dave Green, co-founder of Flying Screens, has spent the last decade trying to combine drones with video screens. “Gradually the technology has reached a point where it became possible,” he says, as LEDs became lighter and brighter and drones got more powerful. Three years ago he started working on a prototype flying screen drone.
In the interceding years, Green and his co-founders, Bryn Williams and Mark Calvert, put on some of the world’s biggest shows. Green wrote the software controlling the 70,500 screens built into the Olympic Stadium’s seating at the 2012 Olympics in London. “We turned that stadium into the world's biggest screen – and we got a Guinness World record for it,” says Green. He also worked on the 4K holograms for Eric Prydz’s EPIC 5.0 tour in 2017.
But putting multiple screens in the air simultaneously presented a set of problems that Green and his co-founders had never encountered before. For a start, attaching a screen to the outside of a drone tends to make them impossible to fly. “Most drones are used to collect information – which is why they’re used for video and photography – but these are here to distribute information,” says Williams. “And to do that we need to put the mass on the outside, away from the centre of gravity.”
To get around this problem, Williams equipped each drone with two 0.8-millimetre-thick screens, each made up of 3,060 LEDs, and weighing just 273 grams. These screens are then attached via a carbon-fibre frame to a drone custom-built by VulcanUAV – a firm that makes drones for crop spraying, building surveying, and search and rescue missions.
Getting the hardware right is only one piece of the puzzle. Currently, the flying screens must be piloted by humans, but the team are working with the Austrian research centre Ars Electronica Futurelab to build software that lets the drones fly autonomously in formation. “It's a question of scale, you can only do limited shows with pilots – once you go past a certain quantity of drones, it's essential we have a swarm operating system,” says Williams.
Green is tight-lipped about future projects, but he says he can see the technology being used for adverts, music videos, and open-air concerts. At the moment, however, the seven-kilogram drones are too dangerous to fly in front of an audience unless they’re kept behind a net. But Green is confident that later versions of the drone – it’s on its fifth iteration already – will overcome that problem. After all, he says, there’s always room for a little improvement. “It’s never the final iteration. It's alway the journey.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
