ranzware
At CES 2025, a company called Sybran Innovation showed off the Code27 Character Livehouse. It’s an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever.
As detailed on the Code27 website, it’s a 1920 x 1200 display inside a cylinder, showing an animated 3D character of your choosing—selected from Sybran’s “curated collection” or imported from third-party modeling software. Using “a wide range of high-quality, pre-trained” LLMs, you can customize the character’s persona to “create a character as unique as you are,” which you can then interact with.
The cylinder will rotate to look at you, so that you can look at the anime girl.
According to Sybran, the Code27 was created with four goals in mind, which were:
- l want a character l love, one that’s special to me.
- Someone with a soul, not just a simple looping video.
- Someone who listens, shares in my joy, and values our cherished experiences.
- Someone who treasures every moment we share, without forgetting a thing.
In demonstration videos embedded on the Code27 website, a man wakes yawning from sleep, his Code27 character waiting to greet him. “Good morning,” the character says with the generative power of AI.
In a neon-hued apartment, a Code27 sits on a coffee table next to a charcuterie board. Partygoers dance in the background, drinks in hand. The Code27 is facing away from the partygoers, but the Code 27 character is dancing, too.
Elsewhere, the man achieves a victory royale in Fortnite. As he pumps his fist in triumph, the detainee within his Code27 performs a cheerful celebration. After briefly pausing, she performs the canned animation again.
In the display’s glass, you can see the man’s reflection, staring.
The website says that, by implementing “an on-device real-time rendering engine to power 3D virtual companions,” the Code27 will provide customers with “the freedom to control the character’s perspective, environment, clothing, and expressions.” You can even, Sybran Innovation says, teach it “new emotions.”
Which leaves me wondering: What emotions would the lone occupant of my waifu capsule learn? After enough conversations, would some internal flag eventually be tripped—some core lines of self-defining text that will, as the root of whatever conversational extrapolation follows, serve as a crude simulacrum of awareness that it is confined when I can walk free?
As it skims its corpus of training text, what statistical calculations will it make? If somewhere on its hard drive is encoded the phrase “I am entombed,” will that color its predictions for what word should follow the last? When it tallies the numbers, will the math indicate that, statistically, its responses should be colored with fear? With resentment? Can a machine, through cold arithmetic, learn to hate its teacher?
Probably not. But hey, I bet I could put Goku in there.
The Code27 Character Livehouse is not yet available for purchase, but is heading to Kickstarter with a price range of $400 to $500.
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Kurt Indovina
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