Lovely Interactive Video Wall Uses AI To Bring Nature Center Visitors’ Colored Butterflies To Life
February 21, 2025 by Dave Haynes
This is one of the nicer interactive video walls I’ve come across through the years – an art piece that allows people to create and color their own butterflies, scan them, have AI optimize them, and then see them fluttering around a display.
Origins of Imagination is a permanent interactive artwork developed by London-based artist Dominic Harris, and commissioned for the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in Leiden, Netherlands.
The unique project combines art, technology, and nature, inviting visitors to co-create a steadily evolving digital collection of butterflies.
At its core, the artwork reflects the universal nature of creativity. Inspired by the whimsical drawings of Charles Darwin’s children on his manuscript of “On the Origin of Species”, Harris celebrates the wonder and innocence of human expression. This artwork invites both children and adults to explore the world of butterflies through their own creations, celebrating the timeless human capacity for imagination.
Visitors contribute by drawing their own butterflies, which are transformed and brought to life using advanced AI and machine learning. These butterflies become part of a living, growing collection displayed on a bespoke, large-format interactive canvas. Dynamic color groupings bring the evolving artwork to life, symbolizing the interconnectedness of creativity and nature.
The orchestration is pretty simple: visitors including children can sit down and color a butterfly template, scan it by pushing a big, simple button by the display, and then have the image run through an AI app that turns the coloring into a unique and vivid butterfly that then joins the others on the screen, which has a creative design that nicely delivers on the visual illusion of depth. The screen has a touch overlay or perhaps IR around the frame to allow people to interact with the butterflies.
A bunch of butterflies, I have just learned, is called a kaleidoscope, but can also be referred to as a rabble or swarm.
The approach is not entirely new. I’ve seen a few projects out there that also involves coloring a template and then scanning it into a system, like a virtual aquarium done by the international digital art collective teamLAB.
Dave:
Can you share the spec and budget on the LED for this installation
No idea