Play of Light

Joe Lindley & Roger Whitham

---

Create a unique journey through imagery of the natural world using torches and mobilephone lights.

 

What is Play of Light?

Designers need to learn how to be creative with AI – how to make it do what we want, and how to use it as part of our craft. We want to help people explore AI image generators, understand what is hidden inside them, and use them as a new creative material. Play of Light is part of Design Research Works, a project that demonstrates how design can play a key role in understanding emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. In 2024 anyone can use Generative AI to create images, but often this involves typing in a text box and then waiting ages to see a few options. Play of Light offers a different experience that allows you to explore a Generative AI model with other people in a collaborative and playful way.

 

How does it work?

Play of Light creates 12 images each second using an AI image generator called Stable Diffusion. Each image is based on the points of light visible to a camera looking down from the first floor window. We uses these points of light to create an animated 3D model that is then fed into the AI image generator along with some predefined text prompts to produce an ever-changing interactive video.

Behind the scenes (upstairs near the camera) we are using a computer equipped with a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to run the AI image model, then sending the video to a projector. In the future, real-time Generative AI of this kind will be commonplace on phones and screens everywhere.

Check out ‘Shadowplay’, our other AI-powered installation on the first floor in the Storey.

 

Credits

This version of Play of Light was created by Joe Lindley and Roger Whitham from ImaginationLancaster, a design-led research centre at Lancaster University.

We a very grateful for extensive advice and support from the LICA technical support team:

Simon Attwood, Mark Bentele and David McBride.

This work is supported by UK Research and Innovation grant MR/T019220/1 as part of

Design Research Works designresearch.works

Special thanks to George Harris and Julie Brown for bringing this work to Light Up Lancaster.