WorkRed Paper Heart
Cycling Dreams
Real-time generative AI landscape driven by pedaling
- Role
- Lead Developer
- Year
- 2025
- Studio
- Red Paper Heart
- Project
- Full case study
- Technology
- TouchDesigner, StreamDiffusion, OpenSprints, Kinect
Overview
Cycling Dreams was a Red Paper Heart prototype: a modern take on one of the studio's earliest projects, The Cycling Classic, rebuilt around live generative AI. Riders pedaled a stationary bike through an endless landscape that kept transforming as they rode.
The bikes connected through OpenSprints, and the riders drove a graphics system built in TouchDesigner. Those graphics went into StreamDiffusion in real time as a depth map, the base for each generated scene, along with curated dynamic prompts that kept the imagery looking good. The result was a surreal, playful landscape that never stopped changing.
My role
I led development on the prototype with one junior developer, and designed the pipeline from the pedals to the generated scenes.
- Wrote a TouchDesigner API for the OpenSprints hardware, turning each rider's pedaling into live input
- Built the graphics system that fed StreamDiffusion a depth map, giving every generated scene a structure to build on
- Built the prompt system, and curated the dynamic prompts that kept the imagery surreal but good-looking