HoloMaid: Human-AI Holographic Companionship

HoloMaid is an interactive anime-style holographic maid (green-haired, cat-eared) confined in a wooden box, powered by a Raspberry Pi 4 and locally-run Gemma 3. Using distance sensors she senses and greets users with a voice and dance, and invites typing on a keyboard so viewers can explore her trapped-in-a-box backstory.

This project employs low‐tech. Unlike most cloud-based AI, she exists only when you plug her in and computes entirely inside her box. She is a sustainable AI character locally hosted and a deliberately slow token rate (2–3 tokens/sec).

Talk to her any way you want. She’s an AI companion, custom-tailored to your messages and moods. Ask her about her backstory, choose to be her friend or not, ask her to tell you her story, vent if you need to, or just sit with her in silence. She might glitch, tease, or tell you something strange. There are hidden surprises tucked into her code and animations.

Presented

DIGITAL SPRINGBOARD Vol.4, TOKYO NODE Lab & NEORT Toranomon Hills Station Tower
Pratt Shows BFA Art & Tech Senior Capstones, Pratt Institute NYC
Afterlives, Steuben Gallery

Hardware

- Raspberry pi 4
- Arduino Nano 33 Iot
- Distance Sensor
- Stereo USB speakers
- Jumper wire cables
- LCD screen
- 2mm acrylic sheet
- Wood box
- Keyboard

Software
- Pi OS lite
- Ollama
- Gemma 3 1B
- Python
- Flite TTS
- MPV player
- Nomad Sculpt
- Blender
- Gemini 2.5
- Hunyuan3D-2

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