Techniques to Conceal Dark Standby Flying Light Specks

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 article, 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.