Umbrella Drones Float Through The Air Like Jellyfish

The sight of flying umbrellas, changing altitude with a fluttering rhythm, looks more like an animated Disney scene than graduate work by a student engineer. "I wanted to push the envelope of coordinating drones in the sky," says the project's creator Alan Kwan, a student in MIT's "ACT" (Art, Culture and Technology) program. He wanted his drones to act almost alive, "not like things to be controlled by an algorithm," he says, "but flying creatures that take on a synchronous life." A Hong Kong native, Kwan, 25, has explored scientific art before. He won an award for his Beating Clock project, a reanimated pig heart that keeps time.