Programmable Light
Software should be able to manipulate the physical behavior of light.
These interactive experiments explore how computation, electric fields, materials, geometry, and photons can be connected into programmable physical systems.
Programmable Light
Experiments in turning software, voltage, geometry, and materials into control over light.
- 01Voltage → phase → light → dataMach–Zehnder Electro-Optic ModulatorApply voltage, change refractive index, shift optical phase, and watch interference redirect light between output ports. Then send a message through it: the link test puts a second chip across a free-space or fibre channel and decodes what arrives.Launch experiment
- 02Programmable wavefrontsPhase SteeringExplore how controlled phase differences reshape an optical wavefront and steer light without mechanical motion.Launch experiment
- 03Geometry → fieldMetamaterial LabExplore how geometry and material structure alter electromagnetic field behavior.Launch experiment
- 04Electromagnetic fieldsField PlaygroundVisualize electromagnetic fields, propagation, interference, and wave behavior interactively.Launch experiment
- 05Light that reroutes itselfAutonomous Photonic FabricVL Fabric 01: four wavelengths, six tunable microring routing cells and four destination nodes. Inject a fault — thermal drift, excess loss, a dead coupling region, crosstalk, congestion — and watch the controller observe it, interpret it, choose between retuning a ring and rerouting the channel, and restore service. Reduced-order physics, deterministic rules, every decision shown.Launch experiment
- 06Difficult photons, reliable decisionsAdaptive Photonic PerceptionVL AEGIS 01: an electro-optical sensor head where aperture, exposure, gain and polarization are the controls and detection is the consequence. Photon counts, shot noise, contrast, motion smear and the diffraction limit propagate into a deterministic detector that says which physical quantity suppressed it — and an adaptive loop that rotates the analyser or retimes the exposure to fix the measurement.Launch experiment
- 07A surface that reads the light it receivesAdaptive Photonic SkinVL SKIN 01: a structured optical surface that captures free-space light, couples part of it into planar waveguides, identifies it with a microring bank and routes the guided fraction to sensors, comms, monitoring or an isolation path. Every incident watt is accounted for — reflected, scattered, absorbed as heat, or guided — and only the guided fraction can be routed at all, which is the distinction the whole lab is built around.Launch experiment
How to read these
- 01 · MODEL
Reduced-order, and says so
Each experiment runs a closed-form model chosen for immediate interactivity: analytical fields, overlap integrals, and Pockels relations. None of them is an electromagnetic solver, and each states which of its numbers are exact and which are approximations.
- 02 · SEPARATION
Physics apart from rendering
Every experiment consumes a generic result object from a provider interface. A real solver can replace the analytical model behind that interface without the visualization or the controls changing.
- 03 · DIRECTION
Toward hardware
These are teaching instruments for the questions the hardware work asks: what the field is doing, what geometry implements it, and what voltage it takes to steer light without moving anything.