Let’s say we find ourselves in a real V for Vendetta-type of situation sometime in the future, and the masses need to take to the streets in order to combat a fascist superpower that’s taken over government and turned society into a total police state. To restore sanity, we’ll need a cunning and totally badass covert leader, we’ll need a working-class girl with some serious heart, we’ll need bullet-proof ideas, and we’ll need graffiti. Lots and lots of graffiti.

That’s where MIT’s “flying pantograph” hovers into the picture.

Created by Sang-won Leigh and Harshit Agrawal, two students who are a part of MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group, the flying pantograph is essentially a drone equipped with a pen, which uses motion tracking technology to mimic a person’s pen movements, and then translate those movements into a drawing.

If you’re unfamiliar with the pantograph—looking at you, people not born in the 17th century—it is “a mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen.” In this case however, since it is the 21st century and all, that second pen is carried by a drone, capable of implementing different aesthetics (looks like Jackson Pollock is the only option for that right now), and able to scale a person’s original drawing down or up.

The revolution will not be super sized!

If there isn’t any major fascist takeover of society however, the flying pantograph will still offer plenty of uses, the most philanthropic of which would be the potential to help the disabled to communicate more effectively. The drone drawer (flying Sharp-eez artist?) could copy a disabled person’s eye movements and translate them into a given illustration. Either way, V probably already has one on back order.

What do you think about this flying pantograph? Tag your thoughts in the comments section below!

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HT: Fast Company

Images: sangww.net