Now I think that AI is going to force a lot of stay-tired conservative professionals in this business to be more creative. Because when their clients can come to them with some, hey, I made this image, I want to do this. You have to acknowledge that. You can't just say, oh, but I just would prefer to stamp some six-inch down lights on this drawing because I know that my fee is conservative and a good, you know, blah, blah, blah. Because I saw the the wildly innovative, unconstrained side of it. That's what drove me into that business. And that's what AI and things like Mid Journey will force the lighting community to do, right? And that and that that's played out, and that's only gonna get worse with AI. If that's if that's your view of lighting design, you're gone because you're you've been replaced by software. Morning, I'm good, Martin. Nice to talk to you again.

Yeah, it's been a while. I wanted to ask right off the bat something that I saw in social media one or two days ago. Somebody posted something about immersive environments on the post, and your good friend and mine also, uh Rogi from La Heida, replied, Oh, talk to Brett Kerner. He's the guru. What would he mean with saying Brett Kerner is the guru when it talks about immersive environments?

I have had about 30 years to think about this. So I've been a bit ahead of the curve on this. Just so everybody might know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a Walt Disney Imagineer. So that was back in the 80s. So I really got into it. I learned what show control systems were and taking cinema and theater design into the real world as a very young kid. So that led me to study architecture at the University of Virginia. And next door to the School of Architecture was the drama department. So I took all the theatrical techno technical courses, lighting and stage set design. So in one side of my life, I'm learning Ley Corbuzi and modernism and Misvanderot and Morphosis and all that. And on the other side, I'm learning narrative and the element of time and storytelling and all the technologies behind that. So then when I went to a master's in architecture up at Harvard, I kept exploring that. And what happened was LEDs came out around that time, blue LEDs specifically. So you had some of the first uses of big LED screens. You had the NASDAQ screen in Times Square, and you had U2 going on tour with their popmart tour. So it very quickly became apparent that like LEDs were going to become an architectural material, and that video and digital content could just simply become an architectural material that surrounds us. So, you know, this was an era of you know, Sony Trinitron monitors that weighed 70 pounds on your desk. And that was not sort of obvious for a lot of people at the time. But when you looked at it, you realized architecture is just going to become this portal to a virtual world. And the internet was taking off, but it was very clunky back then. It was not, there was not good interfaces. You know, you had your keyboard, you had your mouse, you had your 14-inch screen in front of you. And I started to say, well, you combine all of these things, you combine what the best of imagineering or theatrical immersive theme design, and you combine all the technologies of show control and the internet. I said, the physical places will be the best interface to the internet and to the digital world because it gives you so many more uh methods to engage your body as a spatial controller, and it gives you so many ways to layer information, and it gives you so much more terms of all of the architectural terms like threshold and progression and you know placemaking is so much richer when you combine the physical and the digital is to create the interface. Now, what happened is I had perfectly bad timing. I I finished my thesis and published it in February of 2001. And in March of 2001, the NASDAQ crashed, and nobody wanted to hear some kid running around saying they're going to put internet into physical retail stores.

Right.

And then I wound up being a lighting designer in Boston for four years, doing a whole bunch of projects until joining Color Kinetics and product management and getting to experience the whole kind of vanguard of the LED lighting revolution. But I've never stopped thinking about this. And as the technologies have sort of come true to my prophecies, it it's not surprising to me, right? So a lot of the ideas that I theorized in 1999 and 2000 have indeed come true. So I think that's what Rohir was giving me some credit for.

You have published a lot about uh immersive environments, digital walls, and all the things that you can do with it, whether it's in retail and in other environments. It's quite impressive. I I walked through your website uh last few days. There's a lot to digest there, and a lot also is about exactly also this, what you you're just describing. So I find that uh really engaging, and uh somehow you've always seen like uh at the edge, at the forefront of technological developments, also to your journey. You you you and I both are from the the Phillips school, somehow. We we spent time there and evolved from there, you towards color kinetics, and and later I think you you did a lot of other things. Maybe you can describe for those who don't know you that well, how your journey has been to what today I believe it's a freelancing consultancy that you do from Amsterdam with Gurner Design and Lucent.

Yeah, well, as I said, I for some reason as a as a child I developed a fascination with light. And it goes all the way back, I think, to watching the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disney. And then my dad did some landscape lighting around the house and simple things. I've often tried to figure out how a kid become fascinated with light, but I did. And I went up to Boston to start my master's, and I uh got an internship with Ritman Lighting Consultants. So it was Chris Ripman and Adam Kibbe were wonderful to me and taught me all of the old school lighting technologies because that was you know '98 still, pre-LED revolution. And then I worked with Dina Yorkis, who was a Fish and Marant Stone and associate, and moved up to Boston and created her own firm. I worked with her for four years. We won the IELD Award of Merit for montage and did some great projects. Now, as I said, then I moved into the manufacturing side of the business where I joined Color Kinetics because they needed that sort of design market expertise because they were brilliant in terms of the technology, but they really didn't have the application side of it. I did went back to Lamb Partners for a couple of years to do lighting design, joined Micron when they started an LED division. Then I wound up here in Amsterdam 14 years ago at Phillips, where Rohir Vanderheid, the chief design officer of Phillips Lighting, recruited me to do a special projects team. So I did things like the Rijksmuseum here in Amsterdam and uh led a corporate venture and was in the 3D printing venture for a while. And since then I've been doing a variety of startups. So I did a DC Power startup. I was in a retail media network startup. I helped a retail uh branding and signage company develop lighting and redo their marketing. And most recently, I was two years at a company called Megapixel in Los Angeles, which does incredibly high-end LED displays and processing systems for film and broadcast. Uh so to me, the progression has been perfectly logical. To a lot of people look at me, my career outside, that have very siloed impressions of what lighting is or what AV is or what sustainability is, they they kind of wonder why am I all over the place?

You're not really, because there's still sort of a central drive about innovation, about how we can push the envelope from lighting, lighting design, and intelligence. And that brings me to one of your revisits of your early thesis. When I walked to your website, I saw that you looked at your thesis and your thoughts about that in 1999, and you decided to revisit that with the AI tools that you have today with you. Tell us a bit about that.

Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. So I have been incredibly frustrated across my entire career and in education, frankly, at the confusion between tools and results. So in my world view, there's skills, which is I know how to design a great building, I know what it should look like, I know how to do the zoning, I know how to make it look pretty, I know how to structure it, versus the tools, which is I could take a stick and draw on mud, or I could put pencil on paper, or I could use cat or I could use Revit. And then there's the results, which is actually delivering a great building that your client is paying you for. And I've seen all of these revolutions. I'm just old enough that I started at Ritman Lighting using an ammonia-driven blueprint machine and you know, fax machines and currying paper packages around the city and all that garbage. And you know, at school, I had these professors that were like fetishizing these ancient crafts of handrafting and modeling, and they were they were unable and unwilling to accept new technologies because frankly, it was a threat to their ego. So what I did in '99 and 2000 to visualize my thesis was I had to use very clunky early 3D modeling software that took forever to get a single image. I had to use an early version of Photoshop that did not even have multiple undos yet. You can try, imagine using Photoshop where every time you click anything, that's your undo. And by the way, saving would take you about a couple minutes because the files were so big and slow on the old computers. So I literally was taking 35 millimeter slide photography of quarter-inch models that I had projected another slide through to get these effects of showing these sort of digital curtains and digital screens and all this crazy stuff, and you know, scanning it on a you know, slide scanner and all this stuff. And it and it just struck me that, you know, as I'm trying to visualize this future of a spatially driven interactive portal to the digital world, I get these, you know, Harvard professors eulogizing, you know, the craft of ink on Mylar and pencil on Vellum. Like, like somehow that craft is like what makes architecture architecture. And it there, it's in hindsight, it should be obvious to anybody that they're full of it. That's not true at all. A great architect could draw, you know, like I said, a stick in the mud and make a great building. Uh, so I don't have a lot of patience for all these people that bemoan the next generation of technologies. You look remember when Photoshop came out. Remember, there was literally people saying photography will be ruined forever. We'll never trust photos again, photographers won't be needed, right? There's people when CAD came out, they were bemoaning, oh, now we're just going to get rid of architects because we're going to automate the process of architecture with like AutoCAD, you know, version three or whatever. So, what I did is I took those key images that took me a year to make in my thesis, and I just dumped them into Midjourney with a few keys, made a bunch of great visualizations and pulled five-second videos from it. And this all took me about, I don't know, less than two hours. I threw it into Da Vinci and I edited into a short little 30-second video clip. And my point of that is that that was what was always in my imagination. I just never plug a jack into my brain and extract that and share that. Like I have always had a rich imagination as a creative designer, and my limits have always been my hands and methods and tools. And what gets me about AI, we're gonna have this discussion, I'm sure, but like I I was a lot of lighting designers will know exactly what I'm talking about. When you've had to be in a room with an architect who desperately needs to be the most creative person in that room, that they have their big creative egos and they need to be perceived of as the genius with all the ideas, right? Yeah, okay. Well, no, I don't I don't buy that. I've been in so many projects across product and construction that I know that innovation is a systematic process. I can out create and out-innovate anybody because I know the process, right? So I don't really suffer these fools who have created these sort of artistic monopolies because they know some narrow craft, right? You know, they they figured out how to use Photoshop so they think they're like artistic geniuses, and that you know, or now they're you have AI experts and they think they're the gurus on AI. Well, they'll be superseded eventually, too. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it and it's like you know, when the tide goes out, you see who's naked in the water, right? Um, there's a lot of these creative professionals that really don't have very good imaginations.

They banked on the technical monopolies, yeah.

They banked on like the reputation and the technical monopolies to hide the fact that they're really not that creative, and now AI is allowing anybody with an imagination to get that out there and share that and visualize that. So I don't fear AI at all. I I love it, it's great. It's only allowing my creativity to shine even more.

Um yeah, we'll we'll get to that. I I wanted to touch upon some of the other things that you said in the past because you you also mentioned a lot of disruptive trends that you saw coming a couple of years ago. You even spoke to about that on our VLDC platform. U great talk, by the way. And now AI, you you I can see that you have been busy with AI for a few years already, but really for the world as we know it today, it's literally something that has exploded over the last 12 to 18 months, if we can say it that way. Now, if you look back at what you were saying about the disruptive trends, how much is AI, how much is AI sort of disrupting that again?

It's disrupting everything because there was like a lot of concepts about how things could potentially work, but the the tech wasn't really there. It was kind of hopes and dreams. And you know, there's there's like, for example, I spoke years ago about DC power systems and buildings as a fundamental infrastructure way to allow a lot more other innovations to happen in digital displays and sustainable lighting systems and and embedded lighting and ceilings and walls and stuff like that. And as part of that, when you think about the infrastructure going all digital, right, you could you could imagine, say, the the power structure in a building is fundamentally digital. So the the electrons are all flowing through digital. So the system then can monitor where all the power is flowing. Okay. And I said in a presentation, I think four or five many years ago, I forget how long ago, and I said, so there's obviously going to be like machine learning and AI optimizations of how power is flowing and used in these buildings because you don't have this wall between the DC monitoring and the old AC infrastructure. Okay, that's really easy for me to say that five years ago, that of course there'll be this future where you have AI monitoring all this stuff. But now that's like very true and very real, right? And you know, when I say, like, for example, in in a retail display, you know, you'll have kind of a dual world of generative media and traditional canned media, right? And this is something that I was thinking 25 years ago, is that there will be these systems where like it just generates content, who knows how back then, but now it's very easy. Now you have many ways to generate content. You could you could do it algorithmically, you could do it using Unreal Engine or live rendering, you could do AI systems, you have all this ways of doing generative visuals and media, and then you can you know instantly layer on top canned media. So, for example, you could have some perfume display or whatever make it up. You could have the perfume content as some precisely beautiful rendered thing, and the logo is precisely rendered and all that, but the context, the background behind it is constantly generative. And every single time you go in that store over the course of a year, it's going to be different, and it will never look the same. And the design challenge there is that you're you're creating the guardrails for how you want the space to look, and you're letting the AI go crazy and evolve that automatically over time. And those are those are all these concepts that were available in science fiction and all that for years and years and years, and finally they're just available, you know, so radically easy to use and for such low cost that like you've instantly wiped out the content problem on a lot of these digital experiences and architecture. If you could even get the person to put the money in for the hardware, they you know, good luck getting them to put the money in to actually put content on that hardware. Well, the content costs have plummeted now, and the whole process has plummeted. So creating mood boards, creating samples of what it looks like, programming it has you know, 10x or 100x factor less than what you would have been even just two to three years ago.

Yeah, yeah, I think that that's to me is the big the big thing over the last 12-18 months is the speed to which in which AI has developed and increased and multiplied. You say 10x, 100x. It's where where is it gonna stop? It's going so fast that we are we have you you mentioned about uh the photography thing that we we basically have had Kodak moments in the past, but I think we are at another Kodak moment right now where if you don't jump into this AI uh world, you'll be left behind because you know people adapting quite quickly. Now, the older generation like me might have a bit more uh struggles in getting into this because, first of all, I'm semi-retired. Do I really need to? But I find it so exciting that I want to, and and as you know, I've been busy working with with my co-founder Sahil, uh, doing a fundamentals course for AI for lighting designers, because I think it's something you will need to master somehow. You will need to understand what AI can do, because if you don't, it will master you probably in in many ways. So the speed of ch of change and the speed of implementation, I think is mind-boggling.

So that's the accelerating rate of innovation, and that's that's a concept that humans don't deal with very well, is that it's not a linear flat thing, it's an accelerating rate of innovation. And that's happening across many industries, and that's sort of people just don't get that concept.

No, but you I I didn't want to go back on your on your disruptive trends. Would you rewrite that now that with with the knowledge of how AI is already infiltrated in our our daily lives and how we do things?

Uh no. So, for example, like for the IESNA, they had a they asked me to write a future prediction uh back in 2019 for the next decade. And it was delayed a bit by COVID, but it came out in 2020. And I had listed six disruptive trends, is what you're referring to. I think one was like embedded lighting, one was every light a pixel, data driven lighting, and then on the other side of it was sustainable lighting for twin and DC power. And if you look in there, I didn't call it AI necessarily, but I called it machine learning, which is what it was back then. The simpler flavors of that, and all of those concepts that I had. Had were foundational, like the the the explosion of AI just makes a lot of that easier and faster. But you could see that that was gonna happen in the future, right? So when I said all every architectural wall will become a digital display of some sort and it's data driven, how do you how do you generate the content? Well, you know, you could have done it back in 1999 using processing as a language and program something. You could have done it using Adobe After Effects, you know, you could have done it using VJ software for live stuff, but it was just hard, technical. The hardware side of it was expensive. It was it wasn't ready. Now it's like a teenager could go and do it in about an hour, right? Using these AI tools. So I think I think the thing here that a lot of people don't embrace or can't embrace professionally is that in the old days, the technology was the limiting factor, right? Not your imagination. You could imagine stuff and the technology was expensive and slow and all that. Well, now the technology is not really a limiting factor anymore. Practically speaking, the amount of processing power you have. I mean, you can get a Raspberry Pi that has more processing power than a computer from just five years ago for like 30 bucks, right? Yeah, so there's no excuse on the technology. You're only limited by your imaginations. And maybe a more harsh reality is that you're only limited by your project coordination costs and the messy realities of doing something in the real world on a real construction project.

Yeah. Yeah, and and mastering your tools at the same time, because maybe we can we can get into that now a little bit. You you have mentioned that you, at least in your in your brief to me, you told me that you're using Midjourney, you're using right away 11 Labs and ChatGPT, all the language models, I would assume. Tell me a little bit how you use that in your in your daily life as a consultant.

So Midjourney is really the key tool because I'm doing a lot of sort of innovation projects. And at the front end of any good innovation project, you want to like stock the funnel with a lot of ideas. And I find that ideas really need to be visualized. Even if they're abstract, you need to put some sort of visuals on that because us humans are tangible critters. You need to see it, hold it, feel it, an idea, right? You can't just talk and put words abstractly on PowerPoint. You need to visualize it somehow. So this is the architecture training in me where you know what are young architects, what are they taught? You take cardboard, you start ripping it up, you glue it together, you take tracing paper, you sketch crudely. I mean, you you you get the ideas out there as fast as you can. And then that helps build common understanding for everybody. So mid-journey is just my way of, like I said, extracting all the crazy ideas out of my mind and getting them out there, both for me to look, for me to curate and evaluate them, and then to share, right? So, for example, I'm working with um Sean Daris of Lightly again out of Philadelphia for a new round of fixture development. And the first thing that I did with him is I made a deck of tons and tons of ideas for sustainable luminaires, right? And in more time than I ever could imagine, I put together a collection of ideas to show like a bunch of ideas, and then I curate that into themes. So there's a clear theme, and then hey, look at all these great options, right? And it's almost overwhelming to a lot of people because they don't know the process of innovation. So you can drown people now in ideas, and where the challenge becomes is do you have that sort of product manager mindset where you can curate the ideas, you can create the game board, you can create the qualifications, you can de-risk those ideas down to the best ideas, and that's that's what AI will not help you with. Oh, it sort of. Some, you know, all of this is helped by AI. So let's say you need to do market research, Chat GBT is great for that. You need to do blah, blah, blah. There's tons of ways that this all helps. But AI is not going to tell you which is the best product for your company to launch as the daring new innovation thing that you want to put in the market, right? You still need to figure that out as a human being using a variety of tools. And that might be a cocktail napkin sketch, right? It might be a crude cardboard model. I mean, I have a 3D printer sitting right behind my shoulder here. I mean, I can rip off 3D models that I will design, no AI, just I'll design it and I'll 3D print it, and I'll have it in hand in an hour. So, whatever tool you need to get the ideas across that you can share them with your colleagues or with your clients, that's amazing because that's going to help drive better innovation in the long run.

Yeah, so like you said, you're the project manager, but also the quality controller. And the big thing, what I feel, is that, and that's also how we set up this lighting design course, is that there still needs to be the human input. The AI is good in coming up with tons of solutions and proposals and recommendations. But in the end, you also have your creative intuition. And the longer you have been in the business, like you and I have been doing this for years and years, and when we come to a site and we see something, we know intuitively whether something is correct or not, or whether something will work or not. And I think that experience and intuition and innovation spirit is something that you you accrue over the years by doing the projects, and that's where I feel we still have this role of mastering this tool, quality controlling it, making sure that whatever is coming out of there is actually doable, feasible, realistic. And I feel there's still a big role for a lighting designer, regardless of the AI tools that you use, whether it's product design or actual lighting design in itself, to be involved and really curate that to a level where you can, well, I would need to say reach new levels, purely by by adding the human experience to it, which for now, let's say, the AI tools don't really have. But I have no doubt that over time with machine learning and all that, they may also be able to build in some sort of intuition, emotion, and experience. What do you think?

No, I I know exactly what you're talking about here, and what I what I'm thinking about is there's a couple things. So, first off, there's you know, there's us old farts in the business get too conservative and too blasé, and they just keep doing the same tricks because they don't want to actually innovate and they don't want to actually take any risks as you get older. And that's why you need the next generation to come in and wash away the dead wood and come up with fresh ideas. But what I hope is that a lot of these AI technologies will reinvigorate innovation in architectural lighting and placemaking because the the LED revolution, I was just listening to an old podcast that I talked to the get-a-grip guys about what happened. Like, what where are we in such a bad place when it comes to innovation and architectural lighting? And I said, Well, you know, China came in and basically dumped cheap product, and everybody did a race to the bottom on cost, and there's been very little innovation. And where I thought the market would go towards sustainability, it just went to cheap junk.

Right.

So now I think that AI is going to force a lot of stayed-tired conservative professionals in this business to be more creative. Because when their clients can come to them with some, hey, I made this image, I really like it, I want to do this. You have to acknowledge that. You can't just say, Oh, but I just would prefer to stamp some six-inch down lights on this drawing because I know that my fee is conservative and a good, you know, blah, blah, blah. So let me let me tell you another story. So back when I was at University of Virginia, I took an architectural lighting design course in the school of architecture. Okay. And it was an old guy who wore a suit, if you can believe this, and was in a classroom that had like the lighting lab with some old ancient troughers and junk like that. And you know, his view of lighting was zonal lumen calcs and codes and recommended practices. And it's like lighting design by spreadsheet. Okay. You want to use AI to optimize that side of the business, go right ahead. It's just plug your Excel spreadsheet into a machine learning thing, and yes, it gets a little bit faster. And sure, there's going to be a lot of people doing that. Like the boring side of lighting design. Okay, great. Make it disappear. Good luck. You won't get those billable hours anymore, anyway. But on the other side, I went to the theater department. I took the theatrical lighting design course. You know, the the first, the very first day, the first course, Lee Kennedy was the professor, marched us into a black box theater, turned all the lights off, made us sit there in total darkness for a couple minutes until our eyes adjusted and had a single Edison bulb on like a five-minute fade up. And he asked us to describe what we saw. And on and on. And he was connecting the internet to high-end system cyber lights and Roscoe Horizon controllers back in 1995 and 1996. And it was just a wildly innovative, creative view of lighting. And thank God I saw that because if I had only seen the Mr. Zono Lumen Celk and recommended practice guys' lighting, I never would have done another lighting course in my life. I never would have thought about it again. But because I saw the the wildly innovative, unconstrained side of it, that's what drove me into that business. And that's what AI and things like Midjourney will force the lighting community to do, right? I I was have I've been vocally never a fan of the certified lighting design program for this very reason. And I said even years ago, I was looking back in an old blog post. I said, if you can deduce the art of lighting design into a book that can be studied and tested in a multiple choice question, then a computer and a piece of software can do it. So why do you need the artists anymore? And that and that that's played out, and that's only going to get worse with AI. If that's if that's your view of lighting design, you're a goner because you're you've been replaced by software. And frankly, you could have been replaced by old, so you don't need AI. You could you could automate most of that if you really wanted to, pre-AI. Yeah, and you like it was it kind of struck me when I was now getting more and more into the LED display world, and I've spent more of my time at like the integrated systems Europe show in Barcelona rather than Light and Building or Lightfair. And you see the state of the art of those technologies, and those are, by the way, all light sources. You can and then I go back to like lighting designers I know in the States, and I say, Hey, you know, you you want me to stop by and show you this really amazing, like, you know, micro LED display tiled system thing in this whole world of no, we're really not interested in that. That's the AV budget. We don't deal with that. And that kind of breaks my heart when you see lighting designers it's like dismissing that whole world, like, oh, that's A V. That's not our our uh you know uh specification section. And if you take that attitude with AI, you're dead, right? You're not doing it anymore.

You you know you bring up a point. I I interviewed in in one of my last interviews uh Daniel and Phil Hammond from the BHA school, and we talked about AI and education, and basically there's two sides of it the cheating part and the learning part, if I may be crude, right? Because on one way you can use they they noticed this because over the years they had built a good understanding about how students do their submissions, and then suddenly, somewhere late last year or maybe more than a year ago, suddenly the submissions started to change, and they were sort of puzzled, but then realized it was AI that was making its entry into how they submitted their work. But then people were not really declaring the use of AI in learning and pretending that the submissions were their own creations, and I think that brings up a point in general in AI. What you know, how do we AI is good for learning, right? For sure, but how do we use AI in an in a way that is in integrity and it's not cheating because you you just talked about billable hours.

Wait, wait a second. I take a totally different view on what you're describing there. All right, okay. Students are not cheating, it's the professors don't have their act together and are not on top of the technologies. And I'm not sure.

I don't know, but that's what they realized. That they needed to get a handle on AI.

But I'm I'm just saying it a bit crudely about cheating and I know I know I know, but wait, wait, wait, I want to talk about this for a second because you could say, was I cheating when I was using 3D modeling in MicroStation back in the in the day? Was I cheating using Photoshop? Was I was I cheating? Well, to these professors who sat there and just wanted to teach like hand drafting. Yeah, oh, this is well, I this is not architecture, blah blah blah. This is this is a technology thing. This shouldn't even be. I had professors saying I shouldn't even count it as my thesis because it's technology and it wasn't of pretty drawings of a building. And I'm like, you can see in hindsight that that's garbage. And you know what? What's blown my mind is that coming out of like especially University of Virginia, very good design program, but they were very resident about technology and they just worshiped the old hand stuff. Now that can be great, craft, handcraft, beautiful handcrafted concept models can have a quality that you can't get any other way, but you don't do that and stick your head in the sand and say, no, we don't want it, we don't you can't use CAD because we want to see your handrafting, right? And what I think is going to happen here is that Kate, what if you looked at what kids in architecture school could produce as their final stuff in the late 90s around the millennium, and then 10 years later, I went back to Harvard and I looked at the graduation program where all these kids are using Creative Suite, all these kids are using photorealistic modeling, all these kids are using 3D on everything, and they're producing work that would have made the best professional architecture firms blush 10 years earlier. Right? And these are kids in school producing posters unbelievable quality that you could not even have conceived of using the best unlimited budgets and all that just 10 years earlier from those professionals. So are those kids cheating?

No, I think cheating, but the word cheating is a bit provocative in a way.

Yeah, but it's provocative in the wrong way. That's not what they're doing. The kids have evolved faster than the teachers, and the teachers just don't like it because it bruises their ego.

Maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, we used to to Google up things, and now it's just not Google, it's AI. So to me, it's an understandable evolution of how we progress, and and uh what you're saying is totally correct. But the discussion comes up even in describing, I I know several professional practices that declare their use of AI nowadays in in the designs that they do. They they even refer to okay, we used uh uh nano banana.

That's dumb. That's like in the 90s saying, we declare we've used Photoshop.

Yeah. No, no, but we we are in this in this time where we are at this in this transition stage where AI is something new. Some people feel cheated in a way, because oh, you used AI in I think, like you say, they haven't made the transition yet, but they feel like maybe left out or it's not fair. Well, get on with it because AI is here to use, right? So I'm I'm just bringing it up as what I come across in the various practices that I that I see, and and I've seen people declare even the tools that they're using to produce their work.

Again, I think that all of those hesitancies to adopting new technologies are about personal, creative, and professional egos and not about any sort of ethics or morality or context. I just went through a situation with a marketing professional I won't describe any more than that, that was like railing on LinkedIn about how, you know, in the early days, oh, AI is inauthentic. And we, you know, and meanwhile, I'm feeding our sales team books filled with AI so that they can give look book concepts and get great ideas to their customers on how to use these new technologies. And it's it's ridiculous to think that way. That's that's not that's not a moral thing about the tech. That's not inauthentic, that's not cheating. That's just you know, get on with it, be faster. Yeah. The skills you invested, all of your precious university time and like, you know, handrafting or CAD and whatever, yeah, they're not needed anymore. I you know, sorry, the tools, the tools you learn to use are not needed anymore. I really hope the skills you got out of that are useful, right? This this would be like a machinist who refuses to embrace CNC machines. Could you imagine that? I'm sure that there are some old codger machinists that know how to do everything by hand on a lathe and a bridge port and all that, and they think that that's amazing and wonderful, and all that CNC machining is uh that's it's cheating. It's good, yeah, I don't trust it, and I don't could I mean industry after industry, you could say that, right? And there's and that and that again, the accelerating rate of innovation that this is going so fast that there's so much potential here. Let me let me share with you some stats. So I was in these micro LED things, right? There was a 12-inch square tile, had 360 by 360 pixels. Okay, if you do the math, that means like one square inch is five DMX universes of channels. Okay, now you think about that from people who are used to lighting and like Lutron and Crestron and Dolly and DMX and all that small-minded stuff, and you have a whole nother section in the industry that's already moved to like 4k, 8k, and 16k video control of their environment. I'm sorry, but these people are getting they're willingly making themselves irrelevant because they're sticking their heads in their sands because they're so proud of their craft, they think their craft is so precious, they they think their craft is worth billing 200 an hour to their clients. And if you can't say, no, my my end goal is making fantastic placemaking for profit-driven customers, and you can't embrace every new technology, whether that's lighting technologies, DC power, video, AI, all the ways to show that, all the ways to generate content, like you're you're just gonna be left behind fast, too.

Yeah, yeah. So the the the big discussion, of course, is will AI replace us? And we're looking at that from a lighting designer's perspective, maybe from an architect's perspective, basically the design world, so to speak. How do we incorporate AI as part of our daily work? How do we remain in control? How do we use and get the best out of what AI is currently offering us and will offer us in the future?

Okay, so if you are afraid of AI, if you are in the situation that you have invested, you are used to your tools, you're comfortable with it, just start. And a lot of stuff is really, really fun. Mid journey for me. I've I've made the comment that I I use, I joke, I'm a recreational mid journey user. Because it's become like the magazine of my mind for myself that when I am out for a jog and I have an idea, I'll come home and I will just type a prompt in the mid-journey and have the ideas come out. Whereas in the old days, I might scratch a couple of notes in my sketchbook and maybe make my awful chicken scratch black and white sketch. That's like the only way I could have got it out of my mind. Now I can get into an almost photorealistic world that I can see and remember and share. So it's like a that's what I say. It's become this magazine of my mind. It's it's it's wonderful, right? I have also done some hobby projects. I love themed immersive design. I love the IAPA and the TEA crowds and all that, like theme park design, uh museum. Well, there was a competition to do a uh family entertainment center concept, and I just on my own made a whole deck. And that was sort of weird because that was two years ago, right in the middle of the rapid evolution of Midjourney and Gen AI. So I started that as a very traditional PowerPoint deck where I made my own drawings and I made my own renderings and I did mood board images of Google image search and stuff like that. And then I kept seeing the power of what I was doing in Midjourney, and I kept replacing images then with better and better and better AI generated content. And then suddenly video came on. So then I was like, oh my God, I got to like start replacing my video, and I started making video clips. And it was like with it over the course of four months in the summer, like I I made probably the equivalent of 10 versions of this competition entry because it just changed so rapidly on me. But that's how I kept my skills up, and I would make my own voiceover, and I I synthesized my own voice because I wanted a very famous Disneyland announcer voice as like the voice of my presentation. So I would I would tell everyone start using these AI tools for fun, and then you will very quickly see application to your business, to your creative worlds. Um I was trying to get more freelance work, and AI has been a blessing for that because it it uh I've been able to get my ideas out there, visualize fast, and share it on LinkedIn, right? And you've been seeing a lot of the stuff I've been putting out there to get people's attention. I'm basically running a marketing program selling myself on LinkedIn, and what what am I gonna do? Am I gonna show the stuff I did 10 years ago or 20 years ago as like my professional portfolio and try to be relevant for today?

Yeah, I understand. So this brings also the point of copyright and and protection of creative work, because in the past, obviously, it was you designing, you creating with the tools of today. Now we have a creation that uses AI tools that somehow is out there in the cloud. I don't know how protective it is, how much control you have over your creative endeavors that you have while while using AI tools. What what are your your thoughts on that?

Ideas are worthless until invested in by someone. And I've had a very hard lesson from a very idealistic, youthful version of myself where I really believe that great ideas are going to rule the day to the the bitter old curmudgeon that I am now. Where, as we were talking before this, I put 1200 posts on my blog over a bazillion years, and you know what? Nobody steals them, nobody uses them, nobody takes them. So, like these people who think their ideas are precious, you know what that immediately tells me? They have very few ideas.

Yeah, but I mean it slightly the different way. I mean it that somehow what you create in the virtual reality world of AI may be stored somewhere, and and you know it's all like compute from from searching the internet and finding ideas, and the the you so somehow your ideas may be floating around, and somebody else gets an idea that's based on your idea.

Great, that evolves humanity, and I have plenty more ideas. See what I mean? If somebody doesn't have a lot of ideas, they think their idea is precious, they think they deserve to monetize it, they think that somebody is stealing their precious idea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

By the time somebody does that to me, I have already have a hundred new ideas, and I'm on to another area.

Yeah, great, uh, great point of view. You also mentioned in your notes to me uh leadership. I read somewhere that they expect the first AI CEO to run a company very soon. What uh where are we going with AI into leadership, into running companies? Well, what what do you think is happening there?

I don't know if the people listening to the audio cast can see my smirk on my face as I think about all of the people I've worked for over the course of my career and saying, yeah, there's some people I've worked for that I think an AI could do better than. Yeah, it's just like all these people who hate self-driving cars. And then I think about all the people you've driven with or who has driven a car that you've been in, and don't you wish you had a computer driving the car instead of some of those people? Yeah, for some of the people that I've had a ride in a car with, I'd rather have an Atari 2000 driving the car than a Tesla, actually. It would have been safer for me. So um, yes, if the business is steady state, if the business is commodity, if the inputs and outputs and the flows and the conditions of a built business are very steady, well known, well defined, then of course AI will do fantastic at it. Yeah, yeah, because because CEOs aren't doing much, you know, like I've I have been unfortunately in startup environments where a founder got the company off the ground, and all that human magnetism and pitching and convincing and all that got them off the ground, and then their own incompetent management led them to bankrupt their own company. So, are you gonna tell me that that that human is somehow better or worse than an AI version of it?

Time will tell, but uh I I I think I heard it on a podcast or something that they expect the the first company with an AI CEO to emerge very soon. And I think with all the checks and balances that you can build in with AI, it should be it should not be a far-fetched idea at all, like you say. The other thing that you mentioned is that you use AI sometimes as a therapist.

I was wondering what uh what you haven't heard people joke about that using chat GBT as their personal therapist now?

Yes, I heard about it, yeah.

So oh yeah, I mean, chat GBT is actually I mean, very seriously is is you ask it very serious, very human things about life, about whatever, and it's given me outstanding advice. And I guess I'm old enough to recognize if it's good advice or not. I've have enough life behind me that I can do that, but I've been super impressed. I mean, it's it's as good as uh hourly therapist that you're gonna pay for. I mean, it's it's stunning what how much humanity chat GBT can give you. And have you uh, you know, I dare you ask chat GBT, ask him something about life or love or dating or death or some really, really human thing. And then when it gives you the answer, talk to it. Well, how do you know it? How why do you think this? Thanks. I really I re say thanks, Chat TBT. I really appreciate this. This was good advice at the end, and see this response. And if you had those words coming out of a human, you think they're a human.

So I think it's an interesting concept, this whole therapy thing, because I understand AI is also sort of trying to please you in its answers. Yes, you also have used it a lot, and I have lost it, use it a lot also in writing. So it knows me, it knows the things that I like, with the things how I talk, and all that.

So Martin, how is that different from all the humans you talk to?

I don't know, I've not not so much. I I went to a therapist uh during my divorce, but that's about it when I and and you don't think he was trying to make you feel good and like give you a course, of course, of course, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean that's what I'm saying. It's like it's a mirror, it's a mirror on humanity that a lot of humans don't appreciate seeing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But sometimes you you guess, I I guess you need some hard truth in and and not always a pleasing answer. You might need the reality.

Yeah, GBT has given me some of those too.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that brings me to another point about the longevity and and health, because obviously with AI, there are some amazing things happening in that field as well. Today's generation is basically glued to their screen, so we can talk about digital wellness as well. With your immersive designs, which are on a bigger scale than just a little screen on your tablet or or your phone, I think there's a lot also that needs to be done and appreciated within within the digital wellness that we are entering now. And I'm I'm bringing in health and longevity because I feel with the progress that AI is also making in um the medicine, the medicinal world, and and uh the health uh applications, there's a lot there also that touches upon lighting as well.

Oh, it it's it's amazing like how radical you could create stuff right now using available technologies that like most architects and lighting designers have barely can even conceive of. So let me go down this road for just a little bit because I think that some of this is really, really fascinating. I got into this world of the LED displays and the micro LED stuff, which is all back from my thesis, is viewing you know the the physical places that surround us will become portals to the virtual world. Okay, well, that's a two-way exchange. That's we can send stuff to the virtual world, and the virtual world can send stuff to us. Okay, now where most people have no concept of this is that you know it's all light. I've said this before: every light is a pixel and every pixel is a light. And I don't care if it's an Edison bulb on a dimmer or if it's an 8K LED display wall, to me, it's all the same. It's still photons and it's still entering your eye. So you can say, well, that's the lighting budget and that's the AV budget, but that's garbage when it comes to the experience in the real world. Now, we have these technologies coming out of LED displays, for example, where you have such high quality LED displays that I've already seen this, where if you set it up in the right conditions and and people who don't know what they're looking at walk into a space, they will perceive that as reality, right? And even even if you are somewhat knowledgeable about it, those displays have gotten to such a level now, within a couple years, you will have displays that when you're standing arm's length away, will be indistinguishable from reality, right? The surface is so precise, the quality of the LEDs are so precise, the quality of the content is so high, the display processing, the bit depth, the blah blah blah. It's striking. It's striking. And those LED displays are not just RGB anymore. Because in the virtual production world, the RGB displays, as anybody who knows color kinetics for a bazillion years, does not render skin tones very well. So what they've done is they've added extra channels into those displays, right? So these micro LEDs are so small. Now, for example, I was working with this product that had a 0.8 millimeter pixel pitch. So eight tenths of one millimeter was a pixel every okay. That's incredible, right? Okay, but here's the more incredible part within that 0.8, 0.5 of that was black. The micro LEDs, the dies are so small that most of the surface is actually just black that you're looking at. So you can add lots of other LEDs, you can add a fourth or fifth channel into those micro LED displays. So what they're doing is they're adding white, or they're adding amber, or they're adding cyan so that they can get proper skin tones in these virtual production studios and you know, film and broadcast applications. Okay, so then right there, you have melanopic response lighting coming out of your LED display wall. You get complete full spectrum control, just like any other LED source. If you, you know, again, a lot of people are so behind on these technologies, they just don't believe that with enough LEDs, you can replicate any light source you want on the spectrum. There's no quote unquote natural light and all that garbage. You can just make it if you want, right? So you have imagine an 8K resolution wall that has a gorgeous, unbelievably precise surface, it can render any color of the spectrum you want. What's the impact on human health? If you're sitting next to that all day long, if that's in your office or I don't know, whatever, what's the impact? I mean, are you gonna control the blue light output from it across the day? Is that enough? Are you controlling the content on it, the psychological response? Like, what are the cycles of time of the space? Like when you when you go in in the morning, let's say it's you're an early bird and you're in there really early, what should that space look like? Should it look like dawn? Should it look like the sun is rising? When you when you get in there at 10 a.m., shouldn't it look like a beautiful bright day where you have a 10K skydome and you have a 5600K direct lighting on you and it looks beautiful? And then as the day progresses, shouldn't the blue light diminish and shouldn't the horizon go down so you get the beautiful natural sunset? I mean, what what does natural lighting and lighting for well-building standards and on and on and on mean when you have all of these tech and they exist? You can go to Barcelona in two weeks and look at all this stuff, right? And by the way, the content generation is quick and easy and the media distribution has plummeted in price compared to what it was just a few years ago, and on and on and on. So, yes, is it expensive? It's still expensive. If you're budgeting for two by two troughers, this is fantasy world in terms of budgets, but it's not the tech as the limit anymore, it's the imagination of the designers, it's the budgets, it's imagination. All this tech gets cheaper, it always gets cheaper. So there comes a point where you have to acknowledge it and embrace it, right? Yeah, so like I don't think that's what you were fishing for, but that's where I want to send the conversation. Imagine you're doing a healthcare room in a hospital and there's no access to daylight. Yeah, what what would you propose?

No, I was thinking I I was following a couple of those uh biohackers who talk about how to to use the Circadian rhythm, and in the morning they they want to make sure they have enough uh daylight and they use red light therapies, uh, you know, all that for for longevity. There's a lot of relationship now between light and health. And I've just started to dive into that a little bit, and and with AI technology behind it, there's probably a lot also in in uh in the world of uh operation, you know, in terms of uh medical interventions where light plays a role. I I don't know too much about it right now, but I do know that my morning walks in the morning when I wake up really help me to to set my biological clock in terms of also when I have uh you know travel jet lag and things like that, straight away get into my circadian rhythm in the morning. Uh it really helps me to reset my clock uh quicker. So there's a lot of things going on in there at the moment, and I know that people use red light therapies also for health reasons. And that was just what I was fishing about, if you know anything about that.

Yes. So at Phillips back in the day, we had these corporate ventures, and back when we were still the conglomerate with healthcare and lighting together, uh, there was a healthcare lighting startup, and they they had the real science behind this. So, for example, wavelengths of blue light can penetrate the skin and release a certain nitric oxide or something that opens up the vascular flow and relieves pain. And that's not voodoo. That was this is Phillips, it was clinically proven, and there's all sorts of benefits of the various light spectrum from UV to IR, right? And it's just it gets so quickly butchered by false product marketing claims and shady garbage. And and honestly, I hold I hold the architectural lighting industry, the big guys, to task for rushing out circadian rhythm and blue light control when they had really no good justification for that. They didn't have good systems, they had no control systems that were, I mean, they're still using preset scene systems on fluorescent dimmers and trying to claim oh, it's circadian lighting. They made a mess of it. I don't know, is it like ever going to be able to be reclaimed in terms of the mind share of the customers? Will people believe this when you can go on Amazon and find all of the shady, oh, you know, whatever magic health effects, and like now you have everybody's eyeglasses have blue blocking because they don't understand. No, you need blue light in the morning, you need blue light the whole first half of the day, and you don't need blue light in the end half of the day. And something as simple as that has been so butchered in in all aspects of life that I don't know how to respond to that. Like it, I would think it would be incredibly difficult in a consumer market to actually sell real things. I think on professional projects, you could, but it's gonna be an uphill battle, and you're gonna have a lot of clients think that you're just talking, you know, woo-woo, fluffy stuff.

We are not we are not doctors, that's for sure. And we certainly cannot claim that, but um, yeah, for sure. Now you said you had a couple of slides. Is that something that you would like to share? Just as a number of uh nice visuals that you you have prepared so that we can have a bit of a look of those immersive.

Yeah, sure. So I uh yes, so we're sharing it now. I wanted to share this was what I did in 1999 and 2000. This was my thesis, right? When I said we are gonna have this sort of magical surface, these LEDs were very quickly gonna be this digital display in an architectural format. And then color changing lighting was a brand new concept. Digital LED color changing lighting was a new concept. And then you started to see these sort of early MIDI systems where people were putting sensors and cueing up lighting and all that. And then I said that you're gonna have this display that will draw you with animation. When you reach for the product, it will show you specific product information and it will show you a sort of trailing history of the products you have looked at by having an afterglow on it. And then this was what I was able to produce in 2000 using Bentley MicroSt, using Photoshop. And if you notice this yellow piece here, I described it as we're gonna have these avatars. You're gonna have these digital avatars in these spaces that are smart enough to kind of track you and they know your history and they can accumulate information about you. And I said, well, if that's the case, then the architecture has to have a personality. And this is something I'm still writing about to this day. Like AI is only making this far more real, that all these things we talked about, you put into an architectural space. The architecture is basically a robot, it's a giant robot. So that robot can be incredibly personable to you, right? I mean, it it there's no limit in how fantastical you could make a space. You know, uh Tony Stark's AI that he talks to, right? That's all always around him. That's very real. Like, I mean, a teenager could have that together nowadays. So, how you know how are we? going to do it and I I took this image here and I put it in Mid Journey and I pulled these images and I made video and I put this up there and it's you know talk about the difference and how hard it was to visualize before to what you can do today. And you know again this sort of dynamic this is like uh it's not a uh a static background is a dynamic moving background is it yes well if you you have I'm only showing you the still images but the point was the videos where all of this is a big LED surface the whole thing is an LED surface all the lighting on the merchandise is LEDs it's all controllable and it can be integrated with other areas and like this next slide here I I didn't couldn't really get it it looks a lot better when it's animated but there are supposed to be digital displays on all the merchandise too so you have the scale of the walls you have the scale of the ceilings all the architectural lighting can be fully colored tunable pixelated projection mapped you mean any layer of digital information you want on any surface or on any physical object these sort of this notion of layers of reality can be developed right and the effects can be beautiful and the dynamic motion here you know you know Richard Kelly talked about focal glow and ambient luminescence but he had the play of brilliance which was critical to his concept of creating a quality space and you know of course modernism threw away the play of brilliance because people got cheap well with all these digital surfaces and technologies the play of brilliance that concept and also his his qualities of light where he had motion and he had dynamics in there was critical to creating a a wonderful feeling architectural lighting scenario right magic yeah in the theater you see this right in the theater even crude old decades old theaters could have gobos on rotating you know simple things and and architectural lighting has just been so stayed and stagnant it's Le Corbusiers quote architecture is the masterly form a masterly play of forms bathed in light so dumb lumps of concrete you shine the light at it and I've always said no let's invert that the objects the architecture is emitting light it's emitting information it's interactive with you what can you do with that this is just sort of like retail displays now I actually made a a formal CAD version because this is a very hard thing this this one thing you'll very quickly realize with like Midjourney is that the more extreme crazy you go it has no source material to average from so like sometimes I will need to make a model and then then you can throw it in mid-journey and it will help elaborate that which is exactly what you did you you created the model of that tubular display first and then it imported that so to speak. Yeah I made I made a single model of the glass tube and the shelves made three of them put that in mid-journey and then it knew what I wanted and then it was able to elaborate into all these scenarios and and what what this is supposed to be is a secure merchandise display where you have a glass cylinder that can simply rotate around and on the inside the back panel there is an actual micro LED display so it's tiled so you can have it in any format so you can do a vertical display you can have merchandise on shelves in front of that display you can have hardware poking through the display if you really need and you know you you can have a digital backdrop for the merchandise and change it instantly if you want yeah early this was um from 2023 using mid journey when it was very young and I actually loved mid journey back then you can still use those old models if you know how to do it because it was more hallucinogenic it was more free and it would produce things that like don't look right if you stare closely at it but in that that freedom in a way because of the machine learning it restricts itself a bit yes it's gotten more and more real which for better or for worse so sometimes I've actually gone back and like used the old mid-journey models if I really want something to be more crazy more out of out of mind right I mean like these are supposed to be hospital rooms with big LED display walls right and it's just showing like how how profound you could make even a cramped little physical space if you really care about someone healing imagine the power of that wall imagine the power of like seeing watching the flowers slowly evolve over the course of a day or or a whimsical healing dreaming in reality dreaming in reality really you know I think that there would be profound psychological effects.

I couldn't care less even about circadian rhythm and clinical proof it's just the space looks great the space makes someone laugh the space is playful maybe it's a it's a children's ward maybe it's showing fun little you know animals once in a while running through I mean there's so many things that you don't need biological clinical studies about to still make a wonderful experience for a human being right and then this like laughing about how could we connect with the actual person in the room because obviously now with AI there's sufficient technology available to actually identify who is in the room and make the connection between what they see and maybe what happens in their life and the connection could be in retail but like also here in healing when you're in in in uh in um an environment like this or could be the in a spa or a therapy center whatever where you connect the actual person and their reality with an immersive environment that connects with it.

Yeah I I address this in a presentation I gave one time where this discussion very quickly gets derailed by like privacy discussions. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that absolutely drives me nuts because that is so narrow-minded and and ill informed so if you if you think about the architectural experience in terms of tracking in terms of electronic tracking it's a there's the I call it the phases of anonymity so on one hand you could live in a mud hut in the middle of nowhere there is no tracking you are totally anonymous building has no memory of you except for your footprints but then you start to add in simple interactions so hey you know that faucet that you stuck your hand under and it turned on think about it the building was tracking you it responded to you but it was anonymous and it has no memory of you but it still knew you were there and it reacted to you just like a robot right and then you can go up to very sophisticated tracking like a lidar system that can understand that you are a human that can understand where your body is or your limbs are but is not refined enough to understand who you are right and that can all be done anonymously but with tremendous precision about your your body in space or your motion or your linger or your gaze time and then there's the point where you check in and you might check in because you're going to a hospital or because you're going into an airport or because you're going to your private club or your hotel nobody is anonymous when you check into a hotel right do you mean do you want to be on an airplane filled of anonymous people who have never checked in no so there's a lot of very good justified reasons that you must check in you are not an anonymous private person. And then they have your data and then there's levels of just basic like making the thing easier whatever it is easier for you all the way up to having this sort of magic genie that will understand your whole history understand your context it could look at your face and understand your mood and it could look at the current today's topics and it could it could be like this magic butler genie assistant friend confidant to you and you know you go from mud hut to that and anywhere along those lines is is perfectly valid but you've got to understand that continuum and you got to place where you want to be very specifically and why. And then then with that wordy context I'll answer your question. Okay so there's a person here in this healthcare facility obviously they're known obviously their records are known we know their age we know their sex we know what condition they're suffering we know how long they've been there right this is all this basic data that could or should be there okay now now you're the designer you're the creative mind you know all that what are you going to do how is the space going to interact how is the space going to make this person's experience during a tough time in their life better right is it is it clinical circadian rhythm for melanopic response that's one little part of it is it the psychology of making a miserable place happy for them you know who knows like this is this is the to me this is where lighting designers and interior designers and architects should be exploring and should be playing it would be amazing if something like this could be realized it would be amazing if something like this could be realized it can it's like do you have the ambition to have a creative team try yep and trust me if and trust me if if you have a good creative team they can find ways to do this very inexpensively in terms of the installation of the technology and I think what happens is it's too many times you hire these professionals that are used to like big budget spectacles or arena shows or theme parks and they just use all these technologies that just cost a fortune still to this day because they're complete pro tech stuff and you don't have like the hacker mindset of no we're gonna do this all with a Raspberry Pi and like you know some things and and so that's that's the future right and then I think I I don't know what other slides I had here these are some again very early ones where I was just looking at like fitting rooms I mean if I was a luxury retailer like LVMH and I really was looking at the experience of a guest in one of their stores I would put so much money into the fitting rooms it wouldn't be funny. I would have a sumptuous digital experience so that when you go in there and you're trying on your$5,000 dress or whatever it is, you feel like it is the most magnificent experience you've ever had. So when you walk out you are buying that dress right and there's there's very clear ways that you could design those experiences to be phenomenal right and I mean just again where's the creativity you know where is it coming from for like this experience I I don't see it out there. You know I there's very few people that are trying to design immersive digital experiences in the physical real world that are having any success doing it. But you know I I just love this image again this is a three-year-old image from Midjourney and it it just was this wild hallucinogenic thing and it's just oh so inspiring right wouldn't you love to be standing in front of this wall and see this wall but if you look closely like this woman's leg is like blurs into the architecture like you're on LSD or something.

So beautiful it's been absolutely uh lovely to see all this uh Brett and uh now I get uh a bit where gets it from the guru of all immersive uh environments yeah this last slide is just putting an LED wall in a shower you know I mean you have you have more billionaires than ever in the world and they want to spend their money on their home and the most sensual and intimate part of your day for a lot of people is the shower.

Okay so why not make it magical why not make it something extraordinary maybe it's it's just beautiful particles of light maybe it's staring into a forest scenario maybe it's like you're staring at a window overlooking Paris at night in the in your shower go for it and that's easy to do that's really really easy to do actually not difficult yeah yeah of course not that's not difficult.

That's it. Beautiful if there I I want to conclude with one question.

If there's one thing you could change or influence right now in today's rapidly changing world uh where ai is uh so dominant what would it be I think I've given you a lot of answers to that question here I think I I think my old curmudgeon self has complained enough about all the things I want to change haven't I but is there is there one one that stands out above all others yes and it's something I've been focused on which is educating interior designers and architects to have a language around immersive digital experiences so my my grand hypothesis on this is that there was this Generation X, my generation that NASDAQ crash set back all of these sorts of immersive technologies by a decade. And then in 2007 Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and the rest of the world has been little black mirrors so there's a generation now of architects who are in the sort of senior associate and principal roles that have no language around the dynamics of time of layers of reality of connecting space to the digital world and it and it it's a shame because it should have been there. So they're missing that and that's I think a fundamental root cause that they they're just afraid of it. They don't want to put a screen in their project because they think it's just going to be some A V budget and it's going to be some horrible you know I don't know Heineken ad or whatever on it it's going to make their project look terrible and they don't want to see that. And they're not embracing all of these creative potentials about what these the the architectural presence of these digital surfaces and how that's so profound 247 across the course of a year. So that's that's the one thing I would like I would like you know lighting designers especially shame on you you should be very open minded you should be looking at this and you should be going to Infocom or Integrated Systems Europe. And if your if your concept of lighting controls is Lutron and Crestron shame on you right you've got to move on you got to get beyond that.

So thanks Brad it has been a blast to talk to you a lot to digest and a lot to take in there but yeah it's been a very enjoyable chat and I hope to see you soon in Frankfurt we're gonna catch up there. And thanks for this uh beautiful discussion welcome thank you Martin it was good talking to you again I hope I hope I give people a lot of inspiration and not just sort of complaining no no no I know I know you like to give back also and and uh that has really shown through this chat that we've had and thank you for that I think people will really enjoy this this discussion that we have so thank you good luck everyone