The sky is now being written with text prompts
the sky is now being written with text prompts: china’s spring festival gala flew over 20,000 drones in hefei, macau opened its fireworks contest with 3,400, and a new generative pipeline turns plain text into photorealistic collision-free drone choreography.
the fireworks now have a prompt engineer.
Context
CGTN reported on Feb 5, 2026 that over 20,000 drones lit the sky ahead of Spring Festival in Hefei. EHang's Feb 16 release says it took part in the Spring Festival Gala and set a Guinness record with 22,580 drones.
An arXiv paper presents generative AI for safe, photorealistic drone shows, aimed at replacing labor-intensive manual animation.
The 20,000 drones in Hefei and the generative drone show pipeline match the sources. Macau's 3,400 drone fireworks contest opening was not seen in the excerpts read, so unsupported here, not refuted. EHang's own record figure is 22,580.
'the fireworks now have a prompt engineer' is the author's opinion.
Related work
- CGTN: Over 20,000 drones light up the sky in Hefei ↗Hefei show.
- EHang: Spring Festival Gala Guinness record ↗Record figure.
- arXiv: Generative AI for safe and photorealistic drone shows ↗Generative pipeline.
Watch next
- Check the Macau fireworks contest drone count.
Sources
- CGTN, Feb 5, 2026news.cgtn.com
- EHang, Feb 16, 2026ehang.com
- arXiv 2606.25458arxiv.org
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 3 October 2026 at 06:47 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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