Drones took over the New Year's Eve

It is 2020 and technology continues its march towards disrupting different industries. As we all know, fireworks are one of the biggest tourist draws for the celebration of New Year's Eves around the world in cities such as Rio de Janeiro or Sydney. But in 2020, it seems that these beautiful spectacles in the sky are slowly being replaced by an unexpected tech.

I am not talking about domestic drones developed by DJI or Skydio but something with much more potential: drone light shows. Advances in drone swarm management software now allow operators to simultaneously choreograph hundreds or even thousands of specially purposed drones so they can create complex shapes, forms and tell compelling stories in the sky.

Although the technology is not new and has been demonstrated before in controlled conditions, this is the first time it went truly mainstream across the world.

Drone light shows have several advantages over traditional large scale fireworks demonstrations. To start, they are getting cheaper. Rio, for instance, spends more than a million dollars in their annual New Years Eve fireworks spectacle. Intel provides, for $315K, a package including 500 drones. Drones and fireworks can not be compared directly as they produce different results, but I imagine this cost will decrease by an order of magnitude in the next years due to…