LightSense

Engineers train their ears; lighting crews learn mostly by doing shows. LightSense is the equivalent of ear training for lighting: short browser games that train your eye and your hands, built on the same idea as SoundSense.

Who it is for

• Lighting designers and operators sharpening colour judgement and desk habits between shows.
• Lighting students who want structured, measurable practice.
• Theatre, concert and broadcast lighting people building a precise colour and colour-temperature vocabulary.

What is built

Ten games, in five families:

• See
  • Colour Match — mix a fixture to match a target colour, on RGB, RGBW, CMY and five-emitter engines.
  • Colour Temperature — which source is warmer, and which one gel corrects it.
• Make it work
  • Nearest Colour — the designer asked for a colour the fixture cannot quite make; get as close as it allows.
• Point it
  • Pan & Tilt — a hang position and a mark on the deck; give the numbers.
  • Cover It — even coverage, no gaps, no hot centre.
• Patch it
  • Patch It — fit the rig into the universes.
  • Fault Find — from the symptom to the cause, and what you check first.
• Light images
  • Recreate the Look — here is the reference; build it.
  • Cue the Scene — a script excerpt; build the state and the fade.
  • Busk It — the music runs; hit the looks on the changes.

Eleven more are planned and show as Coming in the tool.

Every answer is scored by how close you get, not just right or wrong. LightSense tracks your mastery per game and a day streak, and harder levels unlock as you get more answers right.

Your progress is saved in your account: answers, streak, rank and settings follow you to every device you sign in on, and two devices that trained offline are merged when they come back online. Resetting your progress clears it on every device. The sound-delay setting for Busk It stays on each device, because every pair of headphones lags differently.

Honest limits

Visual training depends on the display it runs on; colour accuracy varies widely between screens. How that is handled — calibration guidance, relative comparisons rather than absolute naming — is part of the design work still to do.