Drone Displays

[Work in progress]

Wikipedia for Drone art

Drones are a relatively recent entry to the display technology field. For these projects, fleets of hundreds of drones are programmed to essentially fly up and create a very large scale volumetric display in the sky for a limited amount of time. All of this requires a lot of advanced technology in avionics, sensors, positioning technology, 3d modeling, and wireless communication. Due to the battery limitations on drones, these kinds of things are really only suited for temporary displays that last less than half an hour, but they still provide a very stunning effect that can be visible almost 2km away.

The most commonly mentioned provider is Intel's division that handles drone displays. It's worth mentioning that on their site (as of 2022) they offer 200 drones for a base of $99,000 or 500 "Premium" drones for $299,000. For super large displays like the world record below (with 3281 UAV's), these require thousands of drones to create enough points of light to make a dense image. There are also significant logistical elements to working with these displays, like planning for local avation laws, securing a space large enough to launch/land from, and planning around weather and other physical constraints.

SkyMagic and Celestial are other vendor options that offer this kind of technology for events.

A very early example of coordinated drones being used as part of a light show is this 2012 piece from Marshmallow Laser Feast called Meet Your Creator: