TamagotchU!

TamagotchU is an emotionally intelligent AI creature that lives inside an immersive XR ecosystem, forming a shared emotional dialogue with its human participants. Rather than feeding massive GPU clusters, it runs locally on our customized small edge devices, turning AI into a collective companion experience. Conceptually and technologically, TamagotchU responds to the rising energy consumption and environmental cost of large scale AI systems. It questions the assumption that bigger computation equals better intelligence or deeper art.

Every player holds one of our tama‑pager devices built from a single board chip with a camera and microphone, which analyzes their facial expressions and voice tone in realtime through customized lightweight multi modal emotion model. These collective emotional signals ignite TamagotchU fish, a group of AI beings occupying real and virtual space, and each has its own characters and personalities. As participants interact, those creatures evolve, reflecting their shared mood and forming new behaviors. Certain group emotion patterns from the audience trigger the creature give birth of a new human head fused fish.

The project began with artist’s personal memory: growing up in Yangzhong, a small island city on the Yangtze River where puffer fish are everywhere in the rivers and immortalized as giant sculptures facing the wetland frontiers. The puffer fish is more than local folklore, it’s a bio‑indicator species, surviving only when the water condition stays clean and balanced. As vast AI data centers rise near Shanghai and Nanjing, they generate immense heat and resource demand, threatening the river ecosystems these creatures depend on.

In TamagotchU, the puffer fish becomes a digital spirit a symbol of fragility, adaptation, and eco-logical interdependence. By running on modest, distributed edge devices, the work mirrors the eco-logical resilience it represents: small nodes forming a living network instead of one voracious cloud.
The installation merges immersive projection, sound, and collective participation. The audience steps into a space where walls shimmer with responsive visuals, the AI creatures breath beside them as living souls, and every shared emotion becomes a new current in a hybrid ecosystem. Emotion becomes frugal energy, care becomes playful computation.

At a time when AI art is dominated by high performance aesthetics and industrial scale computing, TamagotchU offers a quieter rebellion that celebrates sensitivity over spectacle. Its decentralized, low energy design proposes a model for eco‑sentient AI: systems that learn to coexist within the rhythms of both human feeling and environmental boundaries.
TamagotchU ultimately asks a simple question: what if our future with AI felt not extractive, but symbiotic?