gizmodo.com: If you haven’t seen the Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes, you can probably picture the iconic line of dancers kicking in unison, like a salute to American entertainment from a century ago. Well, this year the show got a surprising update: drones.
Dozens of tiny autonomous quadcopters built by Intel float over the Rockettes during the finale of the new show, and the effect is almost magical.
2 comments:
Intel is obviously on the cutting edge of drone technology. Seeing the start of this technology in last years super bowl was amazing, and I was waiting for the first big break into theatre. The only thing I want to know is how much you can tell it is a flying object vs. a projection with moving graphics. Much of what is got from the video was two dimensional, but that could be the angle of the camera. I would be very interested to see how the tech looks live and how it adds to the theatrical experience overall.
I hope that more shows around Broadway and New York continue to find various applications for the technology making it more accessible for your average theatre budget. I also wonder how much it would cost to develop your own drone system for theatrical use. The Intel drone appears to be a lot more robust for outdoor applications that might be overkill for theatre.
We have started to see an increasing amount of drone use in popular usage, and in many different areas of the multimedia sphere. No tonly have they been used as cameras for many years, there amny new applications where they have been used essentially as large screens, or as portable lighting instruments. These applications make for truly impressive performances, but call into question one of the biggest considerations when making live entertainment, the safety of both the performers and the audience. It is a fact of using drones that they sometimes fail, either catastrophically or no. A normal failure would be a cutting off of communication to its control source, which in most cases means the drone will simply slowly lower to the ground. another consideration is battery life. Many drones nowadays have automated systems that detect when battery life is failing, safely lower themselves to the ground when such things happen. However complete loss of power is not otu of consideration when we're talking about such delicate flying machines. There are several videos on youtube of quite large drones crashing out of the sky at major sporting events, for which there were cameras. This is probably why four point suspensiong camera rigs are still so widely in use in sports coverage, because of the factor of safety.
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