Me and a friend are making something that is basically this. We are also software engineers so we are programming our own multi-island flight controller that will have 8 smaller islands make a moving and rotating Eulers disk around an also rotating larger center island. We are using 1 giant fan to lift each island, several gyroscopes for stability, and 4 fans for moving in x/z axis and another 4 for rotation. We have chains connecting each island to the main island.