GridDrones: A Self-Levitating Physical Voxel Lattice for Interactive 3D Surface Deformations
summary
A 15-voxel lattice of custom BitDrones is built: cube drones tracked by a Vicon motion capture system, coordinated over WiFi by a central flight controller and a smartphone UI. Users manually select groups (lasso, contiguous, discontiguous, bimanual grab), set continuous topological relationships for NURBS-style 2.5D deformation, record tangible animations and perform 3D rotations/translations. It works live (demoed with LEGO and ~250 kids) but is limited by ~7‑minute battery life, drone size and density.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:21GridDrones
- 0:39The Ultimate Display
- 1:17Programmable Matter
- 1:41Claytronics
- 3:43Design Rationale
- 5:21Implementation
- 6:39Smartphone App
- 6:50Architecture
- 8:463D Transformations
- 9:19Application Scenarios
- 9:31Surface Modelling
- 10:51Animation
- 11:34Flying LEGO Bricks
- 12:25Computer Vision Scanning Table
- 13:31Limitations
- 14:17Future Work
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