Ars Electronica Futurelab staffers have been doing R&D since 2012 on what they’ve dubbed Spaxels (space pixels)—a swarm of LED-equipped quadcopters that can fly in precise formation and thus “draw” three-dimensional images in midair.

Galileo would make positioning a far easier process. The Studio Lab copters were termed ‘spaxels’ by their research team: a spatial equivalent of 3D pixels. Galileo would richen the palette of spaxels greatly. Perhaps we’ll get a future of extremely small nano-drones that can spontaneously flash mob spaxel graffiti in response to Stuttgart’s drab anti-graffiti drones.

We tackle here the problem of binning in the spatial direction(s). In what follows the term ‘pixel’ refers to a given spatial element of the dataset (sometimes called ‘spaxel’ in the IFS community).