The Cost of a Question is an interactive web experience that aims to visualise the unseen environmental impact of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is often celebrated for its innovation and transformative potential, yet its environmental costs remain largely invisible to everyday users. Training and running large AI models requires immense amounts of electricity, cooling water, and specialised hardware, leading to significant carbon emissions and resource depletion. While individual interactions with AI may appear negligible, at scale they accumulate into an environmental footprint comparable to that of entire nations.
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Because these impacts are hidden, most people lack awareness of the true cost of their digital actions. Current communication around AI sustainability is dominated by technical reports and abstract statistics, which fail to engage the public emotionally or experientially. To create awareness, there is a pressing need for engaging, human-centred experiences that translate abstract data on AI’s energy use into tangible, interactive forms. By visualising these invisible costs in accessible and affective ways, we can spark reflection, conversation, and a deeper understanding of AI’s relationship with the planet.

How might I make the hidden environmental costs of AI visible and engaging, so that everyday users can understand the scale of its energy, water, and carbon footprint?

The primary audience is 20–25 year old young creatives, thoughtful, experimental individuals who are deeply engaged with technology, design, and digital culture. They are students, emerging designers, and artists who value innovation and creativity, often exploring the intersection of art, storytelling, and technology in their own practice.

Importantly, they are also digitally self-aware, conscious of the growing presence of AI in their daily tools and creative workflows, yet not always informed about its hidden environmental costs. The Cost of a Question aims to connect with this group through a balance of technical intrigue and emotional resonance, encouraging them to think critically about the sustainability of the technologies they use and to see themselves as part of the wider system of impact and change.

My initial idea was to explore LiDAR and point cloud technology as a visual medium. I was interested in exploring a tool originally developed for surveying and spatial analysis and experimenting with how it could be used to create immersive, story-driven visuals.

At its core, LiDAR is a form of data visualisation, a way of translating physical space into digital points. By capturing my own LiDAR scans using an iPhone, I began to understand the process behind generating and manipulating the spatial data, gaining insight into how these digital models could be transformed into expressive visual experiences.

Point clouds feel both real yet digital. From a distance, they appear seamless and whole, but up close they reveal millions of individual points suspended within a 3D environment. This duality makes them a powerful visual metaphor for how AI, a digital system, is reshaping the physical world.

After researching the environmental impact of AI and defining point clouds as my chosen medium, my initial idea was to create an interactive website that raises awareness of these hidden costs, translating the data into an immersive visual experience.

I used Three.js, a JavaScript library for creating interactive 3D graphics in the browser. It allowed me to import, render, and animate LiDAR scans in real time while refining lighting, camera movement, and shaders through iterative testing to achieve the desired visuals and interactions.

The Cost of a Question is an interactive web experience that visualises the unseen environmental impact of Artificial Intelligence. Through a series of scroll-based scenes rendered in point clouds, the site transforms data on AI’s energy consumption into an immersive visual journey. The final outcome merges technical experimentation and environmental storytelling to make the invisible systems visible and provoke reflection on the cost of our digital actions.