As companies race to program more advanced versions of artificial intelligence before one another on an international scale, a new startup is trying to establish itself as a contender with its VR pets.
The Vietnam-based startup, Bootloader Studio, has come out with a plan to offer digital pets that use AI to read and respond to human emotion. Bootloader has emerged with $5 million in seed funding, led by Antler Elevate.
This marks a development in an ongoing competition between AI businesses that is becoming increasingly centered around designing AI that have a form of emotional intelligence, allowing them to better interact with people.
Bryan Pelz, Bootloader’s founder and CEO, says he was inspired to start the company during the COVID-19 pandemic, as he realized the limits of current social media and virtual reality in meeting our need for interpersonal communication.
“I became keenly aware of what people do when they’re isolated from other people,” Pelz told Axios. “Endless scrolling, you know, endless consumption of social data about people… but the fact is that we’re wired for, we’re geared for interaction, not passive consumption.”
Bootloader aims to combine AI and spatial computing to reconfigure the way humans interact with technology, according to Pelz.
“A true digital friend needs to be able to judge your mood, and build on your body language,” he said.
The digital pet product has been in development since 2023, when Pelz got early access to the Apple Vision Pro ahead of its official launch in February.
“[We] look at things like your attention, your head position, gyroscope, tone of voice, content of speech, cadence of speech, volume,” said Pelz on how the AI pets work. “Are you moving closer or further away? Are you gesturing? Are you touching something? We’re really exercising every corner of this device.”
Bootloader’s pet companion won’t be a siloed-off application for the Vision Pro, rather, it will operate as a service present next to all the other apps on the device.
According to Pelz, the startup decided to program AI representing animals rather than humans as adding speech to the process of trying to design emotional intelligence is too far fetched at this stage.
“I want to make people feel better- so I didn’t want to give them an Alexa or Siri,” he said.
Bootloader’s digital pets are still in user testing, though the company hopes to launch the service for Vision Pro this Summer.
