Nils Thorjussen: “Drones are a dynamic, three-dimensional platform.”
USA - Entertainment technology industry veteran Nils Thorjussen has helped develop key lighting control solutions, including the Flying Pigs’ Wholehog lighting console and Elements Lab’s VersaTube LED tube. Now, he’s back as the CEO of drone show company Verge Aero.
Thorjussen comments: “A lot of beautiful and outstanding work has already been done with drones in entertainment, but what’s lacking is a fully integrated system making it easy for designers to create and deploy their creative vision via hundreds of drones. For the past two years, I’ve been working with a team of former aerospace engineers to create a comprehensive control system with a straightforward programming interface, effects generation algorithms, full 3D visualisation, and automatic flight path calculation.
“When my lighting friends ask me what I’m up to, I say I’m building Dronehog.” We believe there’s large untapped creative potential for drone technology in the entertainment industry. Drones are a dynamic, three-dimensional platform that allow light pixels or other artistic elements to reconfigure themselves endlessly. The sky’s quite literally the limit!” To give a taste of what’s possible, the team, together with rental partner A&O Drones, recently created a drone light tunnel and raced a Jeep through it.
He continues: “Our software makes it so fast to create a show. No coding or third-party animation software is needed. From scratch, we programmed, tested, deployed, and flew the light tunnel in a couple of hours. This kind of streamlined experience is what’s needed for drone usage to become more widespread in entertainment events.”
Verge Aero is now gearing up to do more shows, having debuted its system with A&O.
Marco Niedermeier of A&O Drones comments: “We evaluated other options prior to investing in the Verge Aero drone fleet and were extremely impressed with the performance of the drones and the flexible, powerful control software. We recently flew a show at a private event in Dubai with great results. We look forward to working together with Verge Aero on other projects to come.”
(Jim Evans)

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