A month ago, at WSJ.D Live, seven autonomous DJI Phantom 3 quadcopters lifted off the ground and performed a drone ballet, arranging themselves in patterns to music. Spark Aerial were the technical wizards behind the show, using DJI’s SDK to control the small swarm of Phantoms. Swarming quadcopters isn’t new, but prior examples of drone swarming required external position tracking or one-off drones made by research organizations like KMEL Robotics (since acquired by Qualcomm) and ETH Zurich. Parrot’s AR Drone also does swarm dances at various events, but uses external position indicators (a visually-encoded floor) and are done in controlled environments.

The WSJ.D drone ballet is really interesting; it hasn’t been covered in the press very much, but the event is as an early indicator of what is possible with current, off-the-shelf drone technology, even at such an early phase in the larger arc of what drones will be capable of doing.