Intel Shooting Star

The Shooting Star is a quadcopter drone designed for light shows by Intel. Constructed of Styrofoam and lightweight plastics, the gadget has built-in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for display purposes. A large number of Shooting Star drones can be controlled by a single computer and operator that can create more than four billion colour combinations from the built-in LEDs, with the system’s algorithms controlling the choreography and optimizing the flight paths.

500 of the drones were used in a light show to set the new Guinness World Record for the “Most Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) airborne simultaneously in November 2016. The drones were used for the Super Bowl LI halftime show performance by Lady Gaga in 2017. 300 Shooting Stars formed an American flag in the sky in the spectacular show, however, owing to the tight regulations during the show and establishment of a no-drone flight zone, the drone show was recorded beforehand. As per Josh Walden from Intel’s New Technologies Group, one possible application of the technology is to use large numbers of drones to perform a visual inspection much more quickly than a single unit.

1,218 of these drones were used for the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, which became the largest drone show in the history of the world.