h a l f b a k e r yWhy on earth would you want that many gazelles anyway?
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The daytime opening act for a nighttime fireworks
display
perhaps. Guessing you got this figured out you'd be
booked
pretty solid. If the budget for the fireworks display was
say
$30,000, I think you could charge 5 grand for this to be
the
opening act dancing around continuously while
people
arrived.
Of course, you could move beyond the pretty abstract
shapes that starlings make and form words, characters,
faces, animations etc. You could even announce the
coming
display by forming the words "Are you ready for...?" then
having a big bundle of drones fly straight up like a
fireworks
mortar and fly apart like they're exploding.
With a little creativity I'd think you could come up with
some pretty entertaining ideas.
See link.
Addendum: The drones would be fitted with smoke
generators, lasers and ribbons as well to add physical
presence to the swarm and allow fewer units to be
necessary to fill the visual field.
Like this.
https://www.youtube...watch?v=8V6qUUWa4zk [doctorremulac3, Jan 06 2016]
Coordinated , Anima...erial Swarm Display
[xaviergisz, Jan 08 2016]
intel drone show
http://www.engadget...setting-drone-show/ [xaviergisz, Jan 11 2016]
[link]
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This is a beautiful idea. + |
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Would you set the "ballet" to either live or recorded music, rather like an open air performance of "Fantasia"? |
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Oh, of course. I'd love to write the piece for that. |
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You could also incorporate drones with smoke and
lasers. |
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Might get to the point where it's as much or more of
a draw than the fireworks. |
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These drones are going to have be either very
numerous (in the hundreds/thousands), or quite
large, or will have to trail something like a coloured
ribbon, in order to be visually striking from a
distance. |
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I like the ribbons idea. Increases the visual profile
a lot without much weight and adds a real time
tracing element to the flight path that could be
incorporated into the routine. |
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I always have mixed feelings when somebody adds
a good idea to one of mine. Sort of like "Why didn't
I think of that?" However, this is how innovation
works. Innovation is a fickle mistress. |
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//very numerous (in the hundreds/thousands)// - drones are expensive now partly because they're new and fancy. In the future, renting 20,000
micro-drones for your display, each drone being about the size of a tennis ball, should not be massively expensive. |
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//20,000 micro-drones for your display, each drone
being about the size of a tennis ball, should not be
massively expensive.// |
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I agree - they could probably be churned out now
for only a couple of quid apiece, so this might
work as a business venture. |
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It's already very easy to simulate flocking or
schooling behaviour in software, and it should be
easy enough to adapt it to produce specific
displays, without having to program each drone
individually. The swarm would have to be able to
cope with the occasional rogue or malfunctioning
drone, though. |
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This idea is clearly passed the "Possible and worth doing"
evaluation phase and into the "Now we need an
entrepreneur with some mad get it done skills to make it
happen." phase. |
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Now of course, as far as the numbers go, since nobody's
seen this, you could get enough spectacle to make it
worth while by having say, 2,000 units to start with.
Nobody's going to say "Hey, that's not a very big droid
swarm!" As long as it's the biggest drone swarm ever
assembled up to that time, people are going to want to
see it, so there's room to scale the idea with time. |
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And the business model is pretty "business 1.0" 1- Buy
2,000 drones. 2- Pay off 2,000 drones with show receipts.
3- Put profit into more drones, grow the fleet, increase
the price. |
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As soon as you get the dough, build the things all in
house. Then your only expense after you've amortized the
manufacturing equipment, injection molds and
automated assembly lines, is raw material. Plastic and
various little metal bits that you'd buy in 50 gallon drums.
If you automate enough, your manpower expenses would
be very low. |
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Hmm. How much power would you need to shade say,
Manhattan on a 100 degree plus day? I know the drones
would generate a lot of heat themselves but they'd be
pretty high up. |
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