How IMAX, Flying Cars, Pyro Drone Shows and More Work | WSJ Tech Behind

TL;DR

WSJ breaks down the hidden engineering behind six cutting-edge technologies including IMAX lasers, electric flying cars, pyro drones, retractable stadium fields, synthetic diamonds, and CAPTCHA.

Key Points

• 1.COSM uses a 27-meter LED dome and custom-engineered lenses to simulate live sports. Its fisheye lens has a custom curvature to eliminate chromatic aberration, took 2 years to develop, and captures a 180° field of view; tickets range from $11 to hundreds of dollars.
• 2.Pivotal's EV tall weighs under 254 lbs and requires no pilot's license due to FAA ultralight classification. It uses 8 propellers, 12 control surfaces, and the entire aircraft tilts to cruise at up to 63 mph; it starts at $190,000 with only a 20-minute flight range.
• 3.The EV tall's software handles takeoff and landing autonomously using RTK GPS, pitot tubes, and three onboard flight controllers. WSJ columnist Dan Neil trained for weeks and flew it with no prior experience, though he suffered significant motion sickness.
• 4.Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has the world's first retractable grass field that splits into three 3,000-ton sections. It lowers 1.8 meters to accommodate NFL sideline personnel, stores under the stands in a grow lab with red and blue LED lights, and converts to an NFL field in 36–48 hours.
• 5.The NFL artificial turf at Tottenham is rolled out in 37 sections weighing 3–4 tons each, joined by Velcro-like seams. The original stored field created long seams the NFL disliked, prompting the switch to shorter cross-field rolls laid over a PVC shock pad.
• 6.Element 6 makes synthetic diamonds via HPHT (800,000 psi, 2500°F) and CVD (microwave plasma) methods near Oxford, England. CVD builds diamonds atom by atom for high-tech uses like quantum sensing; nitrogen-vacancy defects make pink diamonds ideal quantum sensors.
• 7.Synthetic diamonds are being explored for semiconductors, quantum computing, and DARPA extreme-environment systems. Despite superior properties, high cost and slow scaling mean commercial breakthroughs are still 5–15 years away according to Element 6 scientists.
• 8.Sky Elements' pyro drone shows use $1,500 South Korean quadcopters carrying up to six fireworks each, FAA-approved only in 2024. An Orlando incident in December 2024 injured a minor when drones with misaligned GPS collided, prompting new individual geofence bubbles for each drone.
• 9.Pyro drone shows are uniquely complex because each firework must be physically loaded onto a specific drone in a specific grid position. A test show with 600 pyro drones and 1,000+ pyro shots was cancelled at midnight due to the sheer sequencing difficulty.
• 10.IMAX replaced Xenon bulbs with a three-laser projector system with no prisms to achieve higher contrast and brightness digitally. Standard digital projectors lose contrast through prism light-splitting, while IMAX's laser alignment is precise to microns; film production costs $2,000 per minute and CAPTCHA, invented in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, has evolved from warped text to behavior tracking as bots continuously defeat each iteration by training on the very data users provide.