spaxel
n. A display element that can be positioned in any of the three spatial dimensions.
Etymology
Examples
2014
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.
—Magdalena Leitner, “A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Spaxels,” Ars Electronica, September 03, 2014
2013
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.
—Stephen Fortune, “Many, many eyes in the sky,” European Space Expo, June 08, 2013
2003 (earliest)
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).
—Michele Cappellari & Yannick Copin, “Adaptive spatial binning of integral-field spectroscopic data using Voronoi tessellations” (PDF), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, February 13, 2003