What are OATs
According to a report by WIRED, OATs — short for Object Agent Twins — are small AI-based avatars shown on E Ink displays and designed to be paired with everyday household objects. They were conceived by Daehwa Kim, a fifth-year doctoral student in the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University, who presented the project at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology held in Detroit in early November, receiving two honorable mentions.
The idea recalls the Tamagotchi of the 1990s: just as the egg-shaped toy required real-time care, OATs give expressive personalities to inanimate objects. Kim told WIRED she wanted to bring the pleasure of caretaking typical of virtual creatures into the physical world. The system is based on a main module with an indicative cost of around $20, connected to internal and external sensors that detect humidity, temperature, light, presence, and motion.
How they work and what they are for
The avatars' expressions are generated with Google Gemini's Nano Banana image-generation service, which produces a range of emotions tied to data collected by the sensors. Through a web portal, the user can name their OAT and choose which sensors to activate; the system generates positive and negative behaviors based on the object's name and description, which remain customizable.
Kim reports three modes of use that emerged among those who received an OAT. The first concerns the perception of being used: an avatar connected to a coffee machine gets excited when the device grinds beans. The second is signaling dangers near an object, as in the case of a 3D printer that emits toxic fumes during operation. The third is monitoring one's own habits: an OAT attached to a dumbbell records workout frequency and encourages the user not to let the avatar down. The project drew interest at the symposium, where Kim organized an ideas competition and collected a gallery of sprites created by users.
Limitations and open questions
The system has a significant practical limitation: the battery lasts about three or four days, but with the sound-level sensor active it drops to a single day; recharging is via USB-C through a lithium-polymer battery. The project's author therefore considers it primarily a proof of concept. It has also not been decided whether OATs will become a commercial product, despite the requests received.
The demonstration also sparked a debate about the anthropomorphization of artificial intelligence, that is, about whether it is appropriate to attribute human traits and emotions to these avatars in order to create a bond. WIRED cites in this regard anthropomorphic terms already used in the industry, such as chatbot hallucinations or the dream function announced by Anthropic. Kim argues that anthropomorphization can be useful for changing behavior, but calls for caution: for this reason, OATs have very limited interactions, confined to the emotions expressed on the E Ink display. The actual long-term effectiveness and any commercial path remain to be verified.
