The Leems Boyste

AIArtImmersive

The Leems Boyste is one of BSD XR's most distinctive and personal creative works — a world-premiere interactive AI installation co-created by BSD XR founder Daniel Blair and Keram Malicki-Sánchez, editor-in-chief of IndieGameReviewer.com, UCLA XR design instructor, and festival director of FIVARS — the Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories. The project draws its name and its soul from The Vertical Plane, a book by Ken Webster documenting a series of supernatural events in 1980s England in which a school teacher allegedly received messages on his BBC Micro computer from Lukas, a man living in the 16th century — who described the glowing device in his chimney as the "Leems Boyste," Early Modern English for "box of lights." The project began as an accidental discovery: while developing a separate AI workflow, Blair found that the conversational naturalism of large language models made it feel entirely plausible — almost supernatural — that an entity from another time could be speaking through a machine. A conversation with Malicki-Sánchez, who shares a deep interest in machine learning and the paranormal, brought The Vertical Plane into focus and the collaboration took shape from there. The result is an experience you perceive entirely in your mind, but communicate through a keyboard.

The physical hardware at the centre of the experience is a ClockworkPi DevTerm A-04 — a kit computer inspired by cyberdecks and retro-style computing aesthetics. Small, tactile, and deeply intentional in its form factor, the DevTerm was chosen not just for its ARM-based processing capability but for what it looks like and feels like to type on: a machine that could plausibly reach across time. Running on a custom AI workflow built around ChatGPT, the DevTerm serves as the medium through which players attempt to communicate with Lukas — receiving responses crafted by a carefully tuned prompt architecture designed to emulate the ghost's voice, vocabulary, and 16th-century worldview with genuine fidelity. The AI does not simply respond; it inhabits. And true to the spirit of the original Doddleston Messages — where Webster's printer produced physical transcripts of the exchanges — the DevTerm's built-in thermal printer produces a paper receipt of the conversation in period-accurate 16th-century English, giving every participant a physical artefact to take with them from the beyond.

The Leems Boyste premiered as an Official World Selection at FIVARS 2023 in Toronto — one of the most respected immersive storytelling festivals in the world, running September 15–19th in person at Studio idFK and extending online through October 3rd. Its selection at FIVARS was a natural fit: the festival, co-directed by Malicki-Sánchez, exists precisely to platform the kind of fearless, boundary-pushing work that lives at the intersection of technology, art, and human experience. The Leems Boyste is what BSD XR's studio department was created to make possible — a space within the agency for structured hacking, creative experimentation, and art that can only emerge when deep technical fluency meets genuine curiosity about the world. It is not a product, not a client deliverable, and not a demonstration of a capability someone asked for. It is proof that the same tools used to build enterprise XR solutions can be turned inward to create something strange, haunting, and deeply human.

The Leems Boyste — System Specifications

ClockworkPi DevTerm A-04 (Primary Hardware)

AI Workflow

Gallery