You forgot to water the plant. Instead of seeing yellowing leaves, you see a cute plant-shaped pet on a tiny screen, looking sad and dejected. Maybe that’ll give you the push you needed to grab the watering can. As you pour water into the soil, the plant pet on the screen gets excited and happy.
That’s the idea behind OATs, or Object Agent Twins—micro-agent AI avatars on tiny E Ink displays designed to pair with everyday household objects. The tech was created by Daehwa Kim, a fifth-year PhD student in Carnegie Mellon’s Future Interfaces Group. Kim presented the project at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Detroit in early November, a forum where academics and industry experts explore human-computer interfaces, and she earned two Honorable Mention awards.
You might remember Tamagotchi, the popular egg-shaped toys from the ‘90s that housed digital pets requiring real-time care and attention. Kim’s goal was to bring a similar experience to physical objects in our lives. “We bring this joy of caring from virtual to physical objects,” she tells WIRED. While folks have encouraged Kim to sell OATs kits online, she hasn’t decided whether to pursue it as a business opportunity.
Courtesy of Daehwa Kim
Kim says everyone spends all day staring at mobile devices, and AI agents—even if they’re designed to handle tasks on your behalf—still demand attention from your smartphone screen. OATs were a way to bring those interactions out into the real world.
Giving AI a physical body isn’t new, as companies rush to create “the next smartphone,” whether that’s failed attempts like the Humane Ai Pin, OpenAI’s upcoming hardware created in collaboration with famed ex-Apple designer Jony Ive, or Meta’s Muse Charm. The pocket-sized gadget houses Meta’s popular Muse AI agent and is expected to launch in December. Increasingly, though, companies have leaned on “cuteness” in their strategy for widespread adoption.
OATs have an E Ink display connected to internal and external sensors that can track things like moisture, temperature, humidity, light, occupancy, and motion. (The hardware is relatively cheap, around $20 for the main module.) The sprites are created with Google Gemini’s Nano Banana image-generation service, creating a suite of emotions for various states based on the sensor data. You can set all of this up through a web portal, where you can name your OAT and choose which sensors to use for the object you’re attaching it to.
The web app will generate “Positive” and “Negative” behaviors based on your object’s name and description. So if the OAT is attached to a plant, positive triggers could be “consistent air temperature readings” and “low humidity levels” if the plant of choice prefers dry environments. However, you can customize these behaviors to suit your specific plant type.