It has been a busy few months for AI LENS, with new funding, international collaborations, public engagement projects, and growing interest from the creative industries helping to shape the next stage of the project.

AI LENS was recently awarded £12,000 of commercialisation funding through the University of Nottingham’s Impact Accelerator programme. The funding supports a programme of industry engagement and market research, enabling conversations with studios, filmmakers, creative technologists and production companies about how real-time generative AI might fit within existing creative workflows, enhance them to bring new possibilities and capabilities. Alongside demonstrating the technology, the aim is to better understand how practitioners are approaching AI and where AI LENS can contribute to future production pipelines.

As part of this work, AI LENS Principal Investigator Richard Ramchurn recently attended the Marché du Film at the Cannes Film Festival, within the Virtual Production Pavilion. The event provided an opportunity to position AI LENS within the rapidly evolving virtual production landscape, and to discuss with industry professionals how AI is beginning to be used as a live creative tool, rather than solely as a post-production technology.

The project is also developing an international collaboration with New Zealand. This connection began when filmmaker and researcher Dafydd Sills-Jones visited the Virtual and Immersive Production Studio to experience AI LENS firsthand. Conversations have since evolved into a collaborative exploration of linking AI LENS systems across locations, allowing artists, performers and audiences to interact through connected generative environments in real time.

Later this year Richard will be travelling to New Zealand, supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) International Research Collaboration Fund. The visit will include participation in panel discussions at the Oscar-qualifying Doc Edge Festival, AI LENS workshops at Auckland University of Technology, and a research talk at University of Otago. These events will provide opportunities to share the project with filmmakers, artists, researchers and students working across documentary, immersive media and creative technology.

Closer to home, AI LENS is contributing to several new creative projects being developed through the Virtual and Immersive Production Studio. One of these is Inhabitable Worlds, a project inspired by the experience of a profoundly disabled young person whose engagement with immersive installations prompted the team to explore new forms of accessible visual storytelling. Working with Mencap partners in Northern Ireland, the project is developing an AI-guided narrative experience that presents audiences with simple binary choices as they move through a story. AI LENS is being used to generate and illustrate the unfolding moments of the narrative, creating a responsive visual storytelling system that adapts to participant decisions.

AI LENS is also being incorporated into The Magic Paintbrush, an immersive arts project led by Makers of Imaginary Worlds and supported by Immerse UK. Inspired by the traditional story of the same name, the project works with children through creative workshops to develop an interactive narrative installation. As part of the project, Richard has developed a light-painting system that uses AI LENS to transform gestures made in the air into generative imagery, allowing children to create and shape visual worlds through movement and play.

Alongside these activities, work is underway to explore licensing models that would enable artists and creative practitioners to use AI LENS within their own projects. As interest in the system grows, the focus remains on supporting creative experimentation while continuing to investigate how embodied, collaborative approaches to AI can open up new possibilities for filmmaking, performance and immersive storytelling.

What began as a research prototype has continued to develop into a platform for artistic exploration, industry engagement and international collaboration. The coming months will see AI LENS tested in new contexts, by new communities, and through new creative partnerships, and potential commercial partnerships, helping to further explore what AI-enabled creative practice might become.