Skip to main content

Spray-painting drones may soon beautify a construction site near you

Drones at work on a Paint By Drone mural
Carlo Ratti Associati
Massive spray-painted murals are being planned for Berlin, Germany, and Turin, Italy. Rather than employ human interns to do the dirty work, it will be created by drones.

The aptly named Paint By Drone is the brainchild of Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Laboratory and founder of the Carlo Ratti Associati an innovation and design studio leading the project.

“Drones are becoming an increasingly common part of our everyday life,” Ratti told Digital Trends. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration estimates that 1.3 million quadcopters will by in the skies by 2020. “Given this evolving scenario, the idea of employing drones in different contexts is something that has accompanied us in several projects,” he added.

At the MIT Senseable City Laboratory, Ratti lead a project called Skycall, which developed drones as tour guides around the university campus.

“With Skycall, we investigated two main development paths of UAV technology,” Ratti said, “a drone’s capacity to autonomously sense and perceive its environment, and its ability to interface and interact with people. Paint By Drone project represents a step forward in this research path.”

With Paint By Drone, Ratti hopes to take that research one step forward by bringing the UAVs into our public space, where humans can engage with them directly and the drones can hopefully beautify our surroundings.

Each drone will be equipped with CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key) paints and spray as directed by digital submissions from an app.

“The great thing about this project is that the size of the canvas is not fixed,” Ratti said. “The city itself can be the canvas! For the first installations, we are focusing on using Paint By Drone for building sites and scaffold sheeting. However, over the next few months we are planning to develop a plug-and-play system that will allow the technology to be deployed in the blink of an eye on virtually any vertical surface.”

Ratti suggested that such measures could make it easier and safer to create public art. (To avoid accidents, a net will hang between the drones and the crowd.)

Of course, not everyone sees graffiti as a good thing so there will no doubt be backlash should Ratti try to roll out his idea on a citywide scale. But he’s nonetheless enthusiastic about the potential to engage the public.

“Paint By Drone offers a new perspective on street art and shows a new way to engage with the built environment,” he said. “What we call ‘phygital graffiti’ is the idea of leveraging drones and, more in general, digital technologies to create participatory works of public art.”

Editors' Recommendations

Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more