Almost everyone knows Intel as the maker of processors for majority of desktop and laptop PCs in the market. However, the company also has plenty of other products under its wings including the Intel Shooting Star drones.
As opposed to those consumer-grade drones you’ve seen at stores, the Intel Shooting Star drones are made for one purpose: light shows. Hence, these quadcopter drones don’t carry any data capturing hardware or sensors and are only equipped with LEDs which together able to deliver more than 4 billion colour combinations.
Among the latest appearance of Intel Shooting Star drones took place just a few days ago right here in Kuala Lumpur during the New Year Eve’s celebration at Dataran Merdeka which also acted as the launch ceremony for the Visit Malaysia Year 2020. Here is how the show looked like, in case you missed it:
This is not the first time that Intel Shooting Star drones have performed in Malaysia though, as they have previously been utilized by Walt Disney to mark the release of Avengers: Endgame back in April. In addition to that, Johor Darul Ta’zim Football Club has also used them to celebrate their 6th consecutive Liga Super Malaysia title in July.
While the Dataran Merdeka show utilized around 300 drones which already quite impressive, Intel stated that its system is robust enough to support even more drones. In fact, the company has performed a light show with 2,066 drones to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
However, it is certainly not cheap to run the show. According to Intel’s website, the pricing of the drone light depends on the number of the drone required which starts at USD 150,000 (~RM 613,140) for 200 drones. For a show the uses 300 drones like the one at Dataran Merdeka, the starting price is USD 225,000 (~RM 919,710).
Given that the New Year Eve celebration has a budget of RM 2 million, it is quite possible that the cost of the drone light show took a significant chunk of that allocation.
