Sunrise Explorer

An AI-powered experience that transforms your imagination into a personal sunrise and reveals the perfect place in the world to witness it.

Commissioned by Prosus, Tellart was invited to create a new interactive experience using generative AI, exploring the future of seamless AI-powered interactions. This speculative installation explores the boundaries of human-AI interaction, embodied storytelling, and real-time environmental simulation. 

With Prosus’ initiative to explore AI as a tool for creating visually “jaw-dropping” experiences, Tellart approached the challenge as a process to discover how we can achieve a mutual collaboration between human and AI, evolving through close and continuous conversation rather than a hierarchy of user and tool. 

In parallel, we shaped the experience around themes that resonate with Prosus’ portfolio in e-commerce and travel narratives, using them as a starting point to explore the emotional moments that connect people across cultures. 

To do so, we continually asked ourselves: what is a moment in life that takes our breath away, and how can AI amplify it? This question led us to focus on the sunrise as a universally emotional experience. Drawing on our background in theatre and film, Tellart developed an AI character that personalises the journey, adding a sense of intimacy and agency. 

With Tellart’s core values of “making the invisible visible” in mind, we created a real-time data visualisation to reveal the AI’s decision-making process. 

The resulting system functioned as a tightly integrated technical ecosystem, designed not only to render visual and auditory output but to visualise the AI’s presence as a tangible, collaborative agent, advancing methods for translating language, memory, and affect into responsive, real-time environments.

Imagined Dawn to a Real‑world Destination

Imagine a sunrise shaped entirely for you—colours you choose, light that feels alive, and a setting drawn from your own memory, emotion, and imagination. Perhaps you stand by a calm, endless ocean, or wait atop a mountain as the first light edges over the horizon. Maybe it’s a desert, a fjord, or snow-capped peaks.

The Sunrise Explorer invites you into a personal, reflective conversation with Toqan—an AI-powered companion built on the Prosus AI Chatbot. Together, you co-create your ideal sunrise and uncover the real-world destination where it could unfold. Your words transform into a living, real-time, multi-sensory environment where emotion, synthetic intelligence, and spatial design converge.

At the same time, the experience celebrates the sunrise as a universal moment and one of life’s few certainties that connect our shared humanity. It often sparks an emotional sense of beauty and calls us back into connection with nature.

A Conversational Companion

At one of nine interactive stations in front of a large curved screen, visitors begin their journey by connecting to Toqan. Designed to guide, listen, and learn, Toqan invites guests to use their mobile phones to enter a playful, real-time dialogue, co-creating a sunrise shaped by memory, emotion, and imagination.

Conversational Sensing: Gathering Personal Data

The interaction with Toqan is more than just conversation. It’s a form of emotional and sensory data gathering. Toqan asks nuanced questions about what a sunrise means to each guest, prompting reflections on memories, feelings, and associations. In response, guests share personal insights: what emotions a sunrise evokes, what settings it brings to mind, and how it makes them feel. These responses are then analyzed in real time to uncover patterns, preferences, and emotional cues.

Real-Time Visualisation: From Language to Landscape

As the conversation unfolds, Toqan translates the guest’s responses into a dynamic visual experience on the screen. Emotional language and descriptive detail are transformed into elements of colour, motion, and environment, creating a bespoke sunrise that evolves in real time. A tailored soundscape synchronises with the landscape, deepening the sensory impact and enhancing the immersive experience.

‘Geo-Emotional’ Mapping: Locating the Ideal Sunrise

Once the co-created scene—shaped by the emotional, environmental, and descriptive cues shared by the guest—is complete, a secondary display reveals a global map marked with real-world geographic locations. Each personalised sunrise is reverse-engineered into specific coordinates on Earth: places where guests could experience a sunrise that closely reflects their vision in real life.

Bridging Emotion and Technology

To bring the Sunrise Explorer to life, Tellart engaged in an iterative process of prototyping across multiple technologies, testing how interface cues could make the AI’s role feel intuitive and embodied. TouchDesigner was used as the central connective tissue, orchestrating communication between the participant’s mobile interface, Unreal Engine’s generative 3D landscapes, and Processing-based visual logic. We developed a dynamic “blob” agent that not only visualised the AI’s processing but physically traversed the screen space between phone and LED screen to signal agency. 

The team experimented extensively with interaction patterns, exploring how shifting forms, colours, and movement could convey the AI’s manipulation of the environment in real time. A custom ComfyUI workflow generated the final photorealistic sunrise scene, while audio layers produced in Reaper and Nuendo, were triggered live to reflect the conversation’s mood.