The awesome interface designers BERG were recently asked by creative agency Dentsu to create an expression of the role of glowing, rectangular displays in our lives.

Rather than creating some movingly sound-tracked soliloquy about our beloved smartphones, they came up with a extremely forward-thinking idea: Using iPad to create 3-D, time-lapse drawings.

First, they created a 3-D font for iPad, which scrolls across the screen in tiny, cross-sections. (Imagine taking a CAT scan of a 3-D object.) Thus, by waving the iPad around while taking 3-6 second long photos, they created ghostly 3-D light drawings that look like the special effects from a 1980s sci-fi flick.

But that was only the first couple of steps. To make each time-lapse light painting into the full-blown video you see below, they combined almost 3,000 images to create a stop-motion animation.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.