6. Lumiere: a foldable holographic Polaroid device that scans daily objects and transforms them into 3D creatures for reveal and battle
26 Spring, MIT. With Spencer Lin, Tiger Jewell-Alibhai, Stanley Lin.
- D. W. Winnicott"It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative."
Lumiere is a foldable holographic Polaroid device with an onboard camera, display, and AI pipeline that scans beloved everyday objects and transforms them into 3D creatures for reveal and battle. We built it to turn AI into a physical, social play experience that makes ordinary objects feel magical and worth seeing with fresh wonder.
- Physical device, not just an app
- Polaroid-inspired physical design and handling
- Hologram-like reveal
- Multiplayer face-to-face play
- AI for in-person play
- Emergent storytelling
We built a camera that turns anything into a living AI character.
Point it at your coffee mug. Your houseplant. Your dog.
It photographs the object, generates a unique personality, voice, backstory, and 3D avatar — then projects it as a hologram right on the device.
It’s called Lumière. Built it in 48 hours at a hackathon.
Just like a Polaroid, it takes a couple minutes to “develop.” Then your character springs to life and starts talking to you.
Bring two devices together? Their characters start talking to each other.
The entire AI character pipeline — memory, personality, voice, multimodal perception — runs on Estuary, the infrastructure platform I’m building. Same API, same SDKs.