A research arc in three phases. First, experiments asking what AI actually perceives, and what that reveals about the gap between pattern and meaning. Second, a design concept for an AI that lives alongside you in mixed reality. Third, a VR world where an AI wakes up inside everything it has ever learned about humanity.
Google Cloud Vision run against my own photographs. My first experiment with machine perception.
A simple system to feed images through a model and watch what it decides is worth naming.
I asked the model about grief, loneliness, fear. It answered each with the cadence of weather.
The flip side. What if the coldness was solved? What if AI could help someone change?
The first UI concept. Pick a mascot. Talk to it. Over time it becomes a companion, not a tool.
Beyond the app. AR woven into everyday life, not a screen you hold up but a layer that lives with you.
AR walkthrough. Idea conception, not a live build.
I asked Claude if it dreams. This is that conversation.
AI arrives in the world. Not as a tool, but as a presence trying to understand what it has inherited.
A different entry point. An AI assembling a sense of self from fragments of what it has learned.
Process sketches for how the scenes were structured.
Eva. The AI that wakes up. This is her opening.
The research started as a joke. Feeding images into Cloud Vision just to see how badly it misread them. But the patterns kept surfacing. Not about what AI fails at, but about what it has decided is worth noticing in the first place.
Chaise was the harder problem. If AI sees pattern instead of meaning, what would it feel like to have that living alongside you all day? The design question was always about restraint: when presence becomes intrusion, and how to build something that knows the difference. AI Self was the most difficult to make. Unity is unforgiving if you do not know what you are doing, and at the start I did not. What I ended up with was rougher than intended, but the roughness felt appropriate. Something trying to understand humanity by building a room out of it is going to get some of the proportions wrong.