UPDATED 12:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 16 2016

NEWS

Intel joins Disney to put on holiday light show with drones

Drones are being used for everything these days, from generating 3D maps to delivering blood and medicine, and now Intel Corp. has added yet another use to that list: entertainment.

This week, Intel announced that it is teaming up with the Walt Disney Company to put on a series of aerial light shows using Intel’s new Shooting Star drones. According to Intel, the new show, which is called Starbright Holidays, will involve over 300 drones flying above Disney Springs, the shopping and entertainment district in Orlando that was formerly known as Downtown Disney.

“When Disney set out to create an all-new holiday experience at Disney Springs, we realized there was a great opportunity to collaborate on the project to deliver a fresh and innovative approach to its world-renowned light shows,” Josh Walden, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s New Technology Group, said in a statement. “Together, we worked to tackle the new frontier of animation, picturing the sky as our canvas and flying lights as ink.”

The new show will kick off on Nov. 20 and will run through Jan. 8, with a preview show starting today.

Intel first unveiled its Shooting Star drones earlier this month, along with their full specs and capabilities. The Shooting Star drones are quadcopters that are roughly 15 inches across and have a maximum flight time of around 20 minutes, which is plenty of time for the type of light spectacles for which Disney resorts are known. According to Intel, the Shooting Star drones’ built-in LEDs enable over 4 billion color combinations, and the company boasts that with their animation software, new light shows can be developed in just a few days, and the entire spectacle can be controlled from a single computer.

Shooting Star may not have quite the disruptive capabilities of drones that conduct aerial surveys or even drones that deliver burritos—still waiting on that one. But the technology required for Intel’s light shows could make their way into other types of drones. For example, the light shows involve hundreds of drones controlled in unison and require a high level of accuracy to pull off the desired effect. The logistics involved in these tasks could easily be applied elsewhere.

And if nothing else, they just look really cool.

You can watch a video of Intel’s Shooting Star drones in action below:

Image courtesy of Intel

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