Sparked: A Drone Ballet from Cirque du Soleil

Sparked courtesy Cirque du Soleil

Sparked courtesy Cirque du Soleil

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

Quebec entertainment billion-dollar behemoth Cirque du Soleil has broken out of the three ring ghetto with Sparked, a five minute performance video depicting an old-timey lamp maker and his enchanted lampshades. We’re including it here because anything “drones” is automatically our business.

And also because it’s fun.

Published on Sep 22, 2014

Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich, and Verity Studios have partnered to develop a short film featuring 10 quadcopters in a flying dance performance. The collaboration resulted in a unique, interactive choreography where humans and drones move in sync. Precise computer control allows for a large performance and movement vocabulary of the quadcopters and opens the door to many more applications in the future.

The video has had 22,000 views in one day, not a half bad start, thanks to the Cirque’s fan base and having been featured in several tech websites overnight, particularly the influential IEEE which also features a “Making of” video which explains some of the technical details behind the production. It’s fascinating to look at some of the other “dressing” for the copters that they decided not to use: fiberoptics, fur, even detached mannequin heads.



Categories: Art, Cyber, Cyberpunk, Drones, Video, Weird

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