But hats off to the drone wizards who lit up the night sky
THE mesmerising, if controversial, London light show on New Year’s Eve featured hundreds of computer- controlled drones operated by a specialist UKbased company.
Skymagic has developed a custombuilt system that allows it to simultaneously control thousands of drones from a single base.
Each machine can be flown in complex, three- dimensional patterns thanks to an advanced computer program.
Known as swarm drones, they are capable of generating animated shapes such as the London show’s turtle with a rotating planet Earth in its shell, or the walking and waving depiction of Captain Sir Tom Moore, the 100-year-old who raised £33million for the NHS to help fight Covid.
Skymagic’s promotional material says that the LED light source in each drone is a custom design which can be seen up to a mile and a quarter away, while also conserving power to maximise flight time.
‘Our drones are each fitted with nine LEDs housed in a frosted dome on the underside of the vehicle,’ it explains.
Each drone generates 900 lumens – which is slightly more than a 60watt tungsten light bulb.
Artists create the images which will feature in each show and computer programmers then replicate those pictures as points of light in the sky.
Skymagic says its system brings ‘art and technology together in the most unique way possible’.
The computer system calculates ‘smooth and collision-free trajectories’ as the drones form and re-form the images in the sky.
The LEDs are often switched to darkness as the drones form a new image, and are re-ignited as the new shape has been formed, to give maximum impact for the spectators down below.
Skymagic, which has offices in both Leeds and Singapore, was set up in 2015. It has previously operated drone shows at the Great Exhibition of the North, at Gateshead, in 2018; the opening ceremony of the African Games, in Morocco, and the Zurich Festival, in Switzerland, both in 2019; and 2020’s New Year celebrations at Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE.
‘Art and technology together’