Why Drone Light Shows Are Going To Be Everywhere
Have you seen a drone light show recently?
Probably not.
Perhaps you have seen a picture or video of one, but I imagine you most likely have not seen one in real life. Me neither.
Why is that? After all, according to TIME Magazine, we are living in The Drone Age.
If you have seen some of Intel’s biggest drone light show performances on TV or YouTube, you may wonder why we aren’t seeing these more often.
After a few months of working on a drone light show business, I think I have an answer.
It’s really freaking hard to do and it’s really expensive.
This might seem odd, considering you can buy a drone for under $100 on Amazon and fly it within minutes of opening the box. It should be easy to buy a few dozen more, pop a multi-colored light on each one, whip up some software to control them, and start building giant animations and images in the sky, right?
Wrong. So very wrong.
The trickiest problem with this approach is not the drones or the lights, but the software. One person can easily buy a drone and find an app to automate it’s flight path if they are willing to do their research. However, add a few more drones to the mix, and the complexity increases tenfold. Even if you do manage to create automated flight paths for each drone in the swarm, how will you get them to start their flights at the same time? Are you going to use ten or twenty different computers or mobile phones and somehow press “fly” at the same time?
I don’t think so. That sounds like a nightmare.
What’s The Solution?
Currently, there is one commercial solution provided by a Latvia-based software company, SPH Engineering. They have built what they call a Drone Dance Controller.
However, you can not use this software to choreograph the drone show. Instead, you have to develop a 3D animation of the show using 3D animation software of your choice, convert each individual 3D shape’s positions from the animation to a drone way-point file, then upload each file to the Drone Dance Controller, then you can upload it all to the drones.
Piece of cake.
Although this might seem confusing, plenty of smart engineers can figure it out. Why aren’t more companies figuring this out and creating their own drone shows?
What I neglected to share was the cost. SPH Engineering offers a year long Drone Dance Controller license for $12,000. They offer and require training with this license for an additional $8,000. To renew the license, it costs $8,000 per year.
Oh, and also, this software does not work with any drone you can buy off the shelf. You have to build them from scratch and configure them yourself. Each of these drones cost around $600 for the materials alone. If you want to make them pretty, like Intel’s Shooting Star drone… may God have mercy on your bank account.
Why On Earth Will This Become More Popular?
Let me ask you a question. About ten years ago, how much did it cost to buy a single drone that could capture 4k resolution video and directly send it to your smartphone or upload it to YouTube?
Wait… what? That didn’t exist? That’s weird.
Anyway, that same drone now costs about $400, and it can be folded to fit inside of your pocket.
As drones become less and less expensive, this whole drone light show scenario will be far easier to pull off. In fact, I bet there are a few tech companies looking to build a more complete solution than SPH’s Drone Dance Controller at this very moment. (Ours included).
What About Safety?
As drone technology gets better, drones will become safer. In fact, drone technology is pretty great right now, and very safe. Human error is the biggest concern.
As software and people get better at managing swarms of drones, event organizers will feel more secure about having these drones closer to their patrons. Right now, this is a big concern among event organizers. In fact, every event organizer we have talked to has brought up safety as their number one concern.
What Will They Look Like?
You know how a group of birds look when they fly together in formation? I just learned that this is called a murmuration.
It almost looks like one solid shape flying through the sky. Now, imagine that each bird in this flock could shine any color. Imagine that you are able to control the color of each bird as well as the flock’s shape. You can move this flock into any shape you can imagine with an easy-to-use desktop application.
That is what the future of this technology holds. Imagine the possibilities.
Currently, drone light shows are being performed far away from the audience way up in the sky or off in the distance since each drone has to maintain a 2–3 meter distance between one another. I predict that drone light shows will take place directly above an audience, as part of a performance both indoors and outdoors. Drone light shows will be used in the same fashion that lasers and smoke machines are used during performances.
Or, they may be the show that you pay to see.
I also predict that drone light shows will be controlled in real-time. Instead of having to pre-program an entire show and upload the flight paths to each drone, I think operators will be able to control the whole swarm during the show on queue. This will make the drones look like an integral part of the show, not just a cool spectacle off in the distance.
When Will This Happen?
It is happening my friend, and happening fast. Between Intel’s Shooting Star team, Arrowonics, Verity Studios, SkyMagic, my friends at Firefly Drone Shows and our company RotorScape, drone light shows are becoming a new trend that is here to stay.
Personally, I am excited by this. This technology is disrupting the entertainment industry and will continue to do so as it becomes more awesome. It is only a matter of time before we see drone light shows everywhere.
