Members of the Somabotics AI LENS project recently hosted an experimental workshop with researchers from Auckland University of Technology (AUT) to explore how multiple AI LENS installations might be connected across distance to create shared, real-time moving images.

For those new to the project, AI LENS is a filmmaking system that transforms live camera footage using generative AI in real time, allowing filmmakers and performers to interact directly with AI-generated imagery as they shoot.

The workshop focused on testing ways of linking the systems so that visual transformations generated by AI in one studio could be transmitted, received, and manipulated in another. By exchanging prompts, transformation parameters, and visual outputs between sites, the team began experimenting with a distributed form of filmmaking where creative decisions and image generation can occur simultaneously across locations, and addressed questions such as:

• How can generative visual transformations be shared between studios in real time?
• What happens when multiple performers and operators co-create images across continents?
• How might distributed studios collaborate on a single evolving visual space?

Initial tests demonstrated that it is possible to synchronise transformations and collaboratively shape moving images between remote locations. These early experiments point toward new models of networked filmmaking and performance, where geographically separated studios function as a single creative system.

The next stage of this collaborative work explore whether a fully remote AI LENS production can be created across the network, with performers, camera operators, and generative systems operating in different parts of the world while contributing to the same live cinematic environment.