Do you know what a spaxel is? It's a Space Pixel, or a pixel in a 3D space, a multicoloured luminous point that can fly, with free movement in space. To get one, you couple a LED light source to a drone. Or preferably many drones, to obtain many spaxels and create designs, the more points, the more spectacular. This was conceived thanks to the well-known international Ars Electronica festival in Linz. Austria, which for several decades has endeavoured to promote inventions that combine art and electronics.

To give a new flavour to this promotional art project - in development for several years now - AE appealed to Intel for sponsorship for their Drone 100 event.  As you can gather from the name, this uses 100 drones, controlled by 4 pilots, which last November was formed into a swarm to draw spectacular light designs in the night sky over a small airfield near Hamburg, accompanied by music from an orchestra on the ground.

 

The purpose of this is to let us relax and dream for a few moments...to dream of the day when we can do this with ten or a hundred times more spaxels. The good old sound and light shows have their best days ahead of us.