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Five to ten years, eh? https://www.xkcd.com/678/
You can get a cheapish acoustic levitation kit from Tindie[1], and inductive power transmission is hardly a rare technology these days, so where's the innovation? It seems to me all they've done is made a tiny LED with a tiny coil attached to it, right?
And how the hell do they expect to achieve any of the ridiculously speculative things they talk about in the article anyway? Fleets of these things flying around drawing messages in the sky isn't particularly useful if you need to position a massive bank of ultrasonic speakers and a power coil underneath them.
It all smacks of the Hendo Hoverboard[2] bullshit which bad "science" "journalists" breathlessly obsessed over a few years ago, which was similarly just a rebadging of existing technology that was utterly impractical in any context except marketing, coupled with thoroughly nonsensical claims of future utility (levitating buildings during earthquakes, for instance.)
[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/Makerfabs/acoustic-levitator...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
was A Fire Upon the Deep not good?
A Fire Upon the Deep is good. It might not be what you want out of a follow up story set in this universe. It has a heavy focus on a low technology world deep in the slow zone.
Reminds me of Navi from The Legend of Zelda, in a way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navi_(The_Legend_of_Zelda)
"and be built to float about, helping us in our everyday lives"
This guy has grown up on Ocarina of Time and thought "I'm going to make that happen".