The opening ceremony of any Olympics[1] provides pageantry at a global scale, a celebration that, at its best, can create moments every bit as indelible as the games themselves. In Pyeongchang, the curtain-raiser also includes a site never seen before: a record-setting 1,218 drones[2] joined in a mechanical murmuration.
Drone shows like the one on display at the Pyeongchang Games have taken place before; you may remember the drone army that flanked Lady Gaga[3] at last year's Super Bowl. But the burst of drones that filled the sky Friday night—or early morning, depending on where in the world you watched—comprised four times as many fliers. Without hyperbole, there's really never been anything like it.
Shooting Stars
As at the Super Bowl, the Pyeongchang drone show comes compliments of Intel's Shooting Star platform, which enables a legion of foot-long, eight ounce, plastic and foam quadcopters to fly in sync, swooping and swirling along an animator's prescribed path.
"It's in essence technology meeting art," says Anil Nanduri, general manager of Intel's drone group.
Intel's Shooting Star drones are about a foot-long, weigh eight ounces, and can fly in formation for up to 20 minutes.
Intel Corporation
In previous outings, that artistic expression has taken forms like a waving American flag at the Super Bowl, or a twirling Christmas tree at Disney's Starbright Holidays[4]. The Pyeongchang production, as you might expect, includes more Olympic-themed animations, like a gyrating snowboarder and those iconic interlocking rings, all made possible by careful coding, and the four billion color combinations enabled by onboard LEDs. (If you missed the livestream, you can catch the whole thing on the NBC broadcast Friday night.)...