On October 25th, 2025, the world’s first virtual drone show was held at the end of StageFlight 3, an 8 hour long club experience hosted on the VRChat platform.
The show was coded by our Discord user @Happyrobot33, who tweaked the Skybrush ecosystem to perform the virtual drone show with 1000 drones and drone-launched fireworks. Read his post below for an entertaining summary, or visit the #show-and-tell channel on our Discord server where @Happyrobot33 also posted intriguing details about the show.
Why VR?
Running drone shows virtually sounds like it would be easy compared to normal hardware, however there was many hurdles that we had to overcome to get to such a show, in the timespan of just 3 months. With the team all being newcomers to the drone show designing experience, we think we did quite a good job given the timeline.
The team
The team was made up of just 3 people. Rowan McManus (Rowan) was our main particle system designer, making things like the lightning and additional effects. Laura Samson (Windyote) was our creative lead, both leading the team on the creative vision for the show and being the whole reason this team exists. Lastly, Matthew Herber (Happyrobot33), who undertook the massive task of writing a mass of C# code to simulate real drone firmware and show playback, along with editing the Skybrush Studio for Blender plugin for additional support for our pyro needs.
The show
The show in total runs 1000 Lighting drones, along with 16 pyro drones. Each pyro drone has a set of 159 different effects they can each fire, ranging from fire itself, lightning, shells, meteors, sparks, etc. These are all ran via a video stream, keeping the pipeline in GPU as much as possible for performance.
Stage view:
Wide view:
Why Skybrush?
Skybrush was instrumental in creating the worlds first virtual drone show experience. Between the amazing software and open-source code, along with a fantastic dev team to back it, it was really the only choice for something of this caliber.
Photos by Stageflight, USA