Maria is an anime-inspired pseudo-holographic virtual assistant you can make at home.
She is an exploration of playful, character-driven interfaces built on a Raspberry Pi.
Maria recognizes her name and responds to a number of voice prompts, such as asking for the weather in different cities, playing music, and starting a timer.
The industrial design behind smartphones and AI tools to me can feel emotionless and conformist, I wanted to explore what a cute, highly stylized interface could look like.
I opted to program her in C using easily accessible libraries and APIs. In turn, I open-sourced the project on Github, including the 3D prints for her enclosure.
Maria was featured on the Tom's Hardware Pi Cast.