In case you are wondering, Rick Astley did not let us down. What a fun experience!

While “Never Gonna Give You Up” might be the most widely known Rick Astley tune, for the record, this is maybe the best Rick Astley song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPYZpwSpKmA

For more information on the research related to the GridDrones programmable matter platform, visit the GridDrones project page.

This work has also been featured in various media outlets:

Fast Company – October 10, 2018. The craziest projects from a conference on experimental UI
Drones. Flesh computers. Shape-shifting controllers. It’s pure insanity.

designboom – October 11, 2018. cube-shaped drones serve as floating pixels turning thin air into a screen. 

         El Hormiguero 3.0 – October 11, 2018. Rick Astley vuela una flota de drones usando piezas de Lego y un mando en ‘El Hormiguero 3.0’. (Rick Astley flies a swarm of drones using LEGO bricks and hand held controller on El Hormiguero 3.0) 

Academic publications

Sean Braley, Calvin Rubens, Timothy R. Merritt, and Roel Vertegaal. 2018. GridDrones: A Self-Levitating Physical Voxel Lattice for 3D Surface Deformations. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper D200, 4 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3186477

Sean Braley, Calvin Rubens, Timothy Merritt, and Roel Vertegaal. 2018. GridDrones: A Self-Levitating Physical Voxel Lattice for Interactive 3D Surface Deformations. In The 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 87-98. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3242587.3242658