Steve Maassen is the technical and creative lead at Verity Studios. His background includes the technical expertise that comes with being an ETH-trained robotics engineer and the appreciate for performance arts that comes from being a lifelong musician, singing and playing trombone, guitar, and piano. This combination of musicality and engineering shapes his work on some of the world's most ambitious live shows. As choreographer and creative lead, Maassen and Verity Studios have designed indoor drone magic for some of the most high-profile acts, including Céline Dion's Courage World Tour, Justin Bieber's Justice Tour, the Eurovision Song Contest, and MJ One.
Maassen talked to Live Design about the evolution of this unique lighting art form.
Live Design: How has the technology advanced since 2017, when Verity Studios began implementing indoor drone shows?
Steve Maassen: We’ve actually been flying indoors since 2016. We debuted at TED that year, flying over the audience with a prototype of the Lucie micro drone, and later the same year we put a previous generation of drone, the much larger Stage Flyer, on Broadway in Cirque du Soleil's Paramour as flying lampshades. So the story really starts there.
Back then, a lot of what we were doing was opening people's eyes, proving it was possible and safe to have the magic of flying lights inside a live show. Today, while indoor drones are still relatively novel, we're much more part of the palette of live entertainment technology. So we’ve focused on creating better integrations, flying larger numbers of drones (from 33 at TED in 2016, to setting the Guinness World Record with 160 drones in 2019), and making the tech reliable enough to regularly fly over an audience, like we do 10 times a week in Vegas in MJ One. With the launch of a new generation Lucie last year, the drones can fly longer and carry heavier payloads, which is also what made the Mini Beam possible. It's a brand-new lighting effect: a fully mobile beam flying around the venue. We launched it in collaboration with Martin, and then debuted it at Eurovision in May 2025.
LD: For shows like Michael Jackson ONE — LiDAR, RTK, or something else? Has it changed since you started?
SM: Neither, actually. Verity Studios spun out of the Flying Machine Arena in ETH (essentially the MIT of Switzerland and one of the leading tech universities in the world), so we had explored a lot of different indoor positioning systems during our research there. None of them met our needs, nor the reliability and calibration speed required for live events. So, we built our own indoor positioning system from the ground up and it’s been stable since 2016. It’s essentially an indoor GPS. We place satellites (called Kedges®) around the flight area that tells the drones where they are in space. Using this signal, each drone knows where it is in the venue with centimeter-level accuracy, and it corrects its own position roughly a thousand times a second. This means the drones can fly autonomously, which allows the system to scale with no critical single point of failure in communication paths. What’s particularly cool with MJ One, is that the Kedges are flown in and out on rigging by stagehands, so they don’t need to stay on the stage during the rest of the show.
LD: How do you guarantee the safety of the audience? Do you need nets as a backup?
SM: The Kedge system (essentially mini-indoor satellites) forms a virtual boundary for the drones which they cannot pass. This is all software based, and the checks happen on each drone individually. There are no nets. We have never flown with nets over the audience or otherwise. It really ruins the effect and is completely unnecessary with our system. Our safety track record isn't based on a physical barrier between the drones and the audience; it's built into the drones themselves. Every Lucie carries multiple layers of redundancy. If the system detects any issues with the drone, it won’t take off. If it goes off course, it will auto correct. And if one of them genuinely needs to come out of the show, it executes a controlled safety landing that to the audience just looks like a twinkling light.
LD: Have the drones themselves changed in terms of size, weight, speed, battery life and lighting capacity?
SM: We currently fly two generations of drones: the original Lucie and the new generation Lucie. The original Lucie is a little lighter than its successor (50g/1.8oz) but has a shorter flight time (3 minutes) and can’t carry as much payload (so less suitable for the Mini Beam or costumes). The new generation Lucie is a tiny bit heavier at 58g/2oz but can fly for 5 minutes and offers a lot more creative possibility. In general, though, each drone weighs roughly the same as a slice of bread and can fit in the palm of your hand. We’ve mainly optimized the propeller speed for noise, so each drone produces about the same noise as conversational speech.
Each Lucie has onboard RGBW LEDs, powered from the same battery as the rest of the drone (at this size you can't afford a separate one, and you don't need to). The biggest recent launch is the Mini Beam fixture, which is essentially a flying spotlight. This new effect is spectacular to see, imagine beams that can dance around the stage or circle performers as they did during the Eurovision Song Contest in 2025. We’re very excited about this new effect and can’t wait to see how more of our clients integrate it into their shows. The tradeoff for payloads is always the weight constraint. Our number one priority is always to keep the system inherently safe, which means we need to get creative when miniaturizing fixtures that we might know and love in other applications.
LD: What software do you use for choreography? Has that changed?
SM: We use our own custom tools, because nothing off the shelf was designed for what we do. The choreographer designs the show in our choreo tool, and then our AI flight planning layer figures out how each drone gets from shape to shape with the shortest path, without collisions, and hitting every musical beat on time. In the past years we learned a lot about the indoor drone as a creative medium and tailored our custom tools specifically to that. It has lead to a significant quality improvement of the choreography output. Another aspect that changed is the sophistication of our pre-vis environment. Now show designers have a much more realistic idea of what our drones will look like in the show environment. It’s a huge improvement over the flying blobs of a few years ago. We’re also currently exploring better integrations with other tools, including developing an API that enables choreographies to be created in 3D animation tools and ingested into our system.
LD: Can you tell me about the upgrade to MJ ONE last year?
SM: The upgrade last August was actually the addition of our drones. There were no drones prior to this. The Lucies were added as part of a revamp of the show, together with some other new additions like floating screens. Since then, they have been running 10 times a week, accumulating more than 50,000 individual drone flights.
LD: Indoor drone shows are still rare compared to outdoor. Why? Since weather is taken out of the equation you would think they would be much more common.
SM: Indoor is genuinely a bigger technical and safety challenge than outdoor. No GPS, much smaller spaces, audiences underneath rather than at a distance, and stricter noise expectations. In addition, we’re sharing the space with rigging, lighting, props, or performers on stage or even in the air, along with sometimes pyro and projection. The engineering challenges are different enough that there's almost no overlap in capability; you can't just bring an outdoor fleet into a theatre. The safety bar is also much higher (as it should be) and that takes years of designing for reliability and then building a safety track record to clear venue restrictions. So, the rarity isn't really about appetite; it's about how few companies can actually deliver it reliably. The other challenge is expectations. Indoor drone shows are a completely different medium than outdoor shows. Outdoors drones are often used as a standalone story telling tool while indoor drones are special effects, which can break the fourth wall or enhance human performance. The magic is created by proximity, speed and musicality. It’s a truly immersive experience for the audience, rather than a slow-moving set of images.
LD: Can you talk about a particularly challenging production?
SM: One of the most challenging projects we worked on recently was the Joy Awards in Riyadh. The scale alone made it complex, 100+ drones in a 50 by 40 meter flight space filled with moving elements that all had to work together seamlessly.
Right in our flight path was a large orchestra riser with around 30 musicians, along with PA systems suspended in the airspace and multiple moving lifts. This meant our system and trajectory algorithms had to continuously account for a highly dynamic environment while maintaining safe and reliable flight.
Our drones launched from a very tight footprint behind the orchestra at the back of the stage. From there, they had to rise up, pass cleanly over the musicians, and transition into the main performance area above the audience.
At the same time, the production called for a very clean visual aesthetic. To achieve this, we had to fully integrate our Kedge system into the stage floor and seating area, keeping the technology invisible while maintaining full reliability and safety.
LD: What advances do you see for indoor drone shows? What are you excited to see happen?
SM: We have a long wish list. We’d love to fly bigger fleets in smaller spaces, have brighter lights without more weight, and deeper integration with everything else on the stage (video walls, projection, lasers, performers) so the drones aren't a moment, they're part of the language of the show. The good news is, that’s all within our control. We have a super talented technical team who is working on all these topics and we’re excited to see how far we can push this technology.
LD: How is AI changing the use of drones?
SM: For us, AI is what makes 100+ drones flying a complex choreography simultaneously possible at all. Our AI flight orchestration layer solves a planning problem a human just can't. It calculates millions of possible paths through the same airspace, every drone needing to arrive at the right point at the right beat without colliding with anything else. It’s what lets the choreographers focus on the creative moments.
Looking forward, I think we'll see AI doing more on the design side too, suggesting transitions, adapting choreography on the fly, helping designers explore ideas faster. And with the API we’re building, we’ll be able to pass all these designs through our flight orchestration layer to make sure they’re flyable. It’ll open a lot of new possibilities.