Watch: Record 10,000-drone swarm makes a high-def screen in the sky

October 1 is China's National Day – and the high-tech metropolis of Shenzhen celebrated with an eye-popping spectacle: a record-smashing swarm display of 10,197 drones in concert, showing just how far this next-gen entertainment technology has come.

Shenzhen, of course, is the heart of China's high-tech sector, and home to a number of drone manufacturers, notably including DJI. So the city has been treated to some terrific 3D aerial displays in the past – indeed, just four days ago, the Guinness World Records YouTube channel posted a video celebrating the record that's just been superseded.

In the video below, you can see that previous 7,598-drone swarm, co-ordinated through a single laptop, creating three-dimensional aerial images in a range of colors, back at the start of September. Amusingly, it used more than twice as many drones as the record-holder before it, but held its record for less than a month.

But it seems a month is a long time in this game, because the National Day display over Shenzhen Bay Park feels like a step-change in the development of this remarkable swarm tech.

Check out the new record-breaking show, complete with rudimentary motion graphics, soaring rainbow birds, thunderbolts crashing down from heaven, a wild 3D drone mothership, complete with screens on the sides, and a stunning 3D representation of the city of Shenzhen itself.

Actual coordinated motion of the drones themselves in flight still seems quite slow, but with more than 10,000 aerial pixels in play, some of the most interesting moments happen when the swarm simply treats the sky as a big screen, achieving the impression of motion simply by turning drones on and off, or changing their color as if they're static pixels.

And while the 'resolution' of this flying screen seems fairly unimpressive in the official video above, perhaps the overall effect is better represented in the video below, shot by an onlooker from a distance.

China, of course, is where fireworks were invented – around 1,200 years ago, according the the Smithsonian Science Education Center. The country has also comprehensively dominated the multicopter drone space over the last decade, with daylight second, and is home to most, if not all of the biggest volume drone manufacturing facilities on Earth, so it's no surprise that China is leading the charge in pushing co-ordinated drone swarm display technology forward.

And as the X caption above suggests, this stuff isn't just for dropping jaws in extraordinary entertainment displays like this. Small, cheap, agile UAVs like these have proven themselves indispensable in today's warfare, and co-ordinated swarms of thousands of these little critters, controlled by onboard and remote swarm AIs, darting about at over 120 mph (200 km/h) like racing quads, are going to cause problems.

But those are problems for another day; these displays are becoming truly stunning, and they'll doubtless continue to evolve into the greatest mass public entertainment technology we've ever seen. Awesome stuff.

Source: CCTV Video News Agency