Search for: All records

This SIGGRAPH 2026 Frontiers workshop discusses Flying Light Specks (FLSs), their application use cases, current status, and future research directions. An FLS is a miniature drone equipped with a lighting apparatus. It is a building block of next-generation displays, ranging from desktop Dronevision (DV) systems to room-sized holodecks and outdoor spatial-computing environments. Swarms of FLSs will illuminate graphics and animations visible to the naked eye, allowing users to interact with them using their bare hands. This workshop describes the emerging technology behind this exciting area of research. Topics include a classification of FLS devices with LightBender and its 2D lighting apparatus as an example, an end-to-end architecture from content generation to illumination and interaction, physicalization of virtual objects for bare-hand interaction, and a monitoring environment to evaluate and refine the quality of user experience while ensuring their safety. This visionary workshop articulates how these technologies will be used to realize DVs, holodecks, and spatial computing. It describes the use of complementary technologies that realize the vision of these systems. An example is HoloTiles by Lanny Smoot, SIGGRAPH 2026 keynote speaker, as the flooring of a holodeck. More generally, we examine robots of varying forms, morphologies, and functions in relation to DV, holodecks, and spatial computing. This workshop is the prelude to the Third International Conference on Holodecks that takes place on the campus of the University of Southern California on July 24, 2026. The conference includes a tour of our Fly lab with hands-on experience using our authoring tools, FLSs, and illuminations. 

This study presents the hardware and software architecture of a transformative system for illuminating line drawings and letterforms. These mid-air illuminations are indoors and might be animated. The hardware contribution is a drone equipped with servo-actuated rod joints and a dense, addressable LED strip that enables arbitrary orientation, a LightBender. The software contributions are threefold. First, the system implements algorithms and heuristics to estimate the minimum number of LightBenders required to render a line drawing or letterform, stagger swarm formations to mitigate LightBender downwash, generate Swarm Flight and Lighting (SFL) files, and execute these files using a swarm of LightBenders to illuminate line drawings and letterforms. Second, a Blender add-on enables users to register LightBenders, author graphics and animations represented by swarms of LightBenders, and deploy the swarm for illumination through one-click functions. Third, users may import SVG files into either the Blender add-on or a standalone LB-Author tool to illuminate line drawings directly from vector graphics. We present results from an IRB-approved human subject study (n=21) to evaluate the impact of LightBender misalignment on the perceived illuminations. Obtained results demonstrate that the system's 10.1 mm maximum misalignment is perceptually acceptable across tested illuminations, with a median quality rating of 8 on a 0-10 scale. 

A stash is a storage medium such as Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), Solid State Disk (SSD), Hard Disk Drive (HDD), or Non-Volatile Memory (NVM). This paper presents a disaggregated transactional key-value (KV) store, DiStash, that governs KVs across pools of stash types. It enables an application to use a single transaction to read and write different copies of one or more key-value pairs across the different pools of stashes. It simplifies the application logic by (a) preventing undesirable race conditions that may cause copies of data across different stash pools to become inconsistent and/or (b) failures that may result in loss of key-value pairs. A configuration of DiStash may use a pool of stashes as either ephemeral or durable storage. The application dictates whether the content of its participating stashes are inclusive (replicated) or exclusive (tiered). We implement a DiStash by extending FoundationDB. We quantify the tradeoffs with its design decisions using microbenchmarks and eBay’s production workload. We open source our implementation at \url{https://github.com/ebay-USC/DiStash}. 

This companion paper provides artifacts and instructions on replicating the experiments in the ACM Multimedia 2024 paper entitled "Swarical: An Integrated Hierarchical Approach to Localizing Flying Light Specks." Swarm-based hierarchical, Swarical, is a localization technique that enables miniature drones, Flying Light Specks (FLSs), to accurately and efficiently localize and illuminate complex 2D and 3D shapes. It consists of two components, an offline planner and an online localization technique that executes on an FLS. The offline planner uses the FLS sensor specification for positioning to convert mesh files into swarms of FLSs. Some FLSs are dark and used only for localization. We reported the online localization technique to be fast and highly accurate. We describe how to reproduce this finding using our artifacts. 

This paper presents the design and implementation of a Flying Light Speck (FLS) to illuminate English letters. The FLS uses its onboard camera and computing to localize and follow a trajectory to illuminate a letter. We evaluate the illuminations quantitatively and qualitatively. The latter is based on an IRB approved human subject study with 20 participants. The obtained results show a 42 to 56 millimeter error that impacts the detection of letters. A key finding is that the order in which the illumination of letters is presented to subjects has a significant effect on detection duration. 

Authoring tools typically convert 3D animation data into 2D rasterized formats for display, a process that imposes computational burdens, degrades depth fidelity, and complicates the recovery of original 3D information. This paper presents the first known direct integration of Blender, a widely used 3D animation tool, with Dronevision (DV), a 3D multimedia display composed of synchronized Flying Light Specks (FLSs). In addition to raster-based pipelines, this integration enables real-time, high-fidelity illumination of 3D animations directly in physical space. Our system leverages Blender’s piecewise animation model—comprising manually placed keyframes and mathematically defined interpolation functions—to generate spatiotemporal trajectories that are mapped to the motion of autonomous FLS drones. We introduce the concept of a display clock that is maintained by each FLS and synchronized across all FLSs using a broadcast based protocol. Our techniques have a fixed complexity independent of the number of FLSs. They enable a DV to scale to millions and billions of FLSs. 

A Flying Light Speck, FLS, is a small drone configured with light sources to illuminate different colors and textures. A swarm of FLSs illuminates complex 3D multimedia shapes in a fixed volume, a 3D display. An FLS is a mechanical device. Its failure is the norm rather than an exception, causing a point of an illumination to go dark. In this paper, we use reliability groups with dark standby FLSs to minimize the duration of time a point remains dark. We introduce three techniques to prevent a dark standby FLS from obstructing the user’s field of view, FoV. All three move the FLS out of the user’s FoV. One technique, Suspend:Closest, maximizes the utility of a standby FLS while preventing it from obstructing the user’s FoV. 

One may construct a 3D multimedia display using miniature drones configured with light sources, Flying Light Specks (FLSs). Swarms of FLSs localize to illuminate complex 3D shapes and animated sequences. This requires FLSs to measure their relative pose (distance and angle) accurately. A challenge is how to do this when the sensors used by FLSs have a blind range that prevents them from quantifying their relative pose. Our technique, Swazure, requires FLSs to cooperate to compensate for their sensor's blind range. It implements {\em physical data independence} by abstracting the physical characteristics of the sensors, making point cloud data independent of the sensor hardware. The size of an FLS relative to the minimum distance between points of a point cloud is an important parameter. It may result in potential obstructions that prevent Swazure from quantifying relative pose. We present two techniques, move obstructing and move source, to address this limitation. Our experimental results show the superiority of the Move Obstructing technique. 

This paper presents the design and implementation of a circular flight pattern for use by a 3D multimedia display, a Dronevision (DV). A DV uses drones configured with light sources, Flying Light Specks (FLSs), that are battery powered. The flight pattern enables a swarm of FLSs to enter an opening, granting them access to the charging coils to charge their batteries. We present two algorithms for an FLS to travel from its current coordinate to rendezvous with its assigned slot on the flight pattern, Shortest Distance (SD) and Fastest Rendezvous Time (FRT). In addition to quantifying the tradeoff associated with these algorithms, we present an implementation using a swarm of Crazyflie drones with Vicon localization.