Modeling Illumination Data with Flying Light Specks

A Flying Light Speck, FLS, is a miniature sized drone configured with light sources. Swarms of FLSs will illuminate an object in a 3D volume, an FLS display. These illuminations and their data models are the novel contributions of this paper. We introduce a conceptual model of drone flight paths to render static, slide, and motion illuminations. We describe a physical implementation of the conceptual model using bag files. We evaluate this implementation using different lossless compression techniques. A key finding is that our bag file implementation is very compact when compared with the original point clouds. While compression reduces the size of a bag file, a combination that includes the use of both internal bag file compression (lz4 with chunks) and Gzip is not necessarily the most compact representation. We open source our software and its point cloud sequence data for use by the scientific community, see https://github.com/flyinglightspeck/FLSbagfile.