Photometric design was a specialist's craft. This put it in a browser.
Outdoor lighting design ran on scarce expertise: IES photometric files, uniformity ratios, optic taxonomies, and site models that took days to build. Every parking lot, sports field, and warehouse queued behind a small pool of specialists.
Light ARchitect turned that craft into a product: draw a boundary on live satellite imagery, let AI propose fixture layouts, check the numbers against real photometry, and walk away with a spec-ready design. Free, in the browser, and on the jobsite in AR.
Three walls between a site and its light
The canvas is the real world
No abstract CAD plane. You search an address, the site appears in satellite view, and everything you draw — boundaries, poles, wall packs, measurements — lives at real-world scale on the real property.
Numbers you can defend
Simplifying the workflow never meant softening the math. Every design computes from real IES photometry: average, max, min, and both uniformity ratios per stat area, with a PDF the spec reviewer will accept.
5,000 files, zero browsing
Experts don't browse catalogs — they eliminate. The library never renders unfiltered: pick CCT, lumen band, wattage, and optic first, and the 5,000-file curated set collapses to the handful that fit.
Curated is the operative word: distilled from a manufacturer catalog of 250,000+ photometric files down to the set a real design actually chooses from.
A lit field in a tap
Baseball, softball, football, soccer, tennis: pre-engineered pole counts, mounting heights, and foot-candle classes, dropped as a template and aligned over the real field. The interaction model behind this is one of the three patents.
See it before it's built
The product began as one of commercial lighting's first AR applications: stand on the site, place a virtual fixture, and see the luminaire — and its light — in context. That camera-first DNA still runs through the platform's photo mode.
What six years shipped
The job was never to hide the photometrics. It was to make them navigable — for the contractor and the specialist in the same interface.
Interaction design, filed as IP
Three of the product's core interaction models were novel enough to file. Co-inventor on all three; assigned to Signify.
The intelligence moved into CORE
The IES library and the layout intelligence didn't stay in one app. They became Fixture Recommendation and Smart Layout inside CORE, Cooper's cloud platform — AI that reaches the sales desk and the spec sheet.
That chapter is its own case study: Enterprise AI.
AI that proposes. People who decide.
Light ARchitect is where the thesis formed: the system computes, ranks, and explains — the professional keeps the call. Spatial trust on real imagery, progressive disclosure for mixed expertise, and a human-AI feedback loop that respects the standard. The same spine now runs through the defence and security work.