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NewMedia Creative Technology Studio unveiled AI HOST at IMEX America 2026. The installation enabled live spoken conversations between visitors in Las Vegas and four digital characters.
The system combined an AOTO LED wall, Brompton processing, a local show computer running Unreal Engine 5 and AI processing hosted in Spain. According to NewMedia, the setup achieved a median delay of 2.6 seconds between a visitor finishing speaking and the character beginning its reply.
Installed on the company's stand, the display used a 6ft by 12ft LED wall built with AOTO RM1.5E panels and driven by Brompton processing. Visitors used a 12.9-inch iPad interface to choose one of four characters, enter their name and start speaking through an Audio-Technica PRO49QL gooseneck microphone.
A JBL stereo system played back the characters' voices, while the screen showed facial animation and lip-sync in real time. Spoken replies also appeared as live subtitles.
How it worked
Voice capture was a key part of the installation because the conversations took place on a busy exhibition floor. The team used a directional microphone and volume-threshold gates so speech recognition remained usable even while a character's response was playing in the same space.
The on-site show computer was a custom laptop with a 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 memory. It also had 96GB of DDR5 memory, a 4TB PCIe Gen 5 SSD and external liquid cooling.
The machine ran Unreal Engine 5 for facial animation and lip-sync at a specified 60 frames per second. It connected to the company's AI infrastructure in a data centre in Spain, where speech-to-text, response generation and other processing took place.
NewMedia said its dedicated AI server used eight NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs with 768GB of combined GPU memory, dual AMD EPYC server processors and 1TB of ECC system memory. The workflow linked speech recognition, language understanding, answer generation, voice generation, animation and lip-sync.
Diego De Anna, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, NewMedia, described how the response pipeline was designed to reduce delays. "The system does not wait for the complete answer before it begins speaking, which is why the response feels so immediate," he said.
Fallback system
The installation also included a local backup for connectivity problems. Four internet interruptions during the presentation were covered by offline voice support, according to NewMedia.
"The application includes prerecorded answers and animations, as well as smaller models that can run locally," said De Anna.
The production required decisions about how a character should behave during an unpredictable exchange with the public. The system was delivered as a live-operated experience, with each of the four characters assigned a different conversational role.
One character discussed the company and the events industry, another ran quizzes on a chosen topic and difficulty level, a third offered playful compliments and a fourth produced fictional predictions. According to the studio, the setup was intended to combine character design, conversation settings, animation and show logic with the venue's hardware and operation.
Carolina Comas García, Executive Creative Director, NewMedia, outlined the team's approach to the performance side of the installation. "The team combined a wide range of animations with gate logic and artistic direction to make the character adaptable to the live situation," she said.
Visitor figures
NewMedia said 329 individual visitors took part in 402 conversations across Smart Monday and the three show days. Some people spoke to more than one character.
The company's system records showed more than 12 hours of live conversation and 1,171 exchanges between visitors and characters. Median visit time was 1 minute and 36 seconds.
Interactions were conducted in English and 25 other languages, with 127 conversations taking place in languages other than English. According to NewMedia, 99% of visitor exchanges were spoken aloud, 82% of visitors greeted by a character replied, and 174 people held three or more exchanges.
The studio also said 42 visitors described a real event they were planning during their conversations with the characters. AI HOST was developed by the NewMedia team, including Comas García, De Anna, Camilo De Anna and Adrien Boitelle.
NewMedia is developing client-specific versions of the format for trade shows, corporate events, museums, destination experiences and brand activations. Each version is defined by the client brief, the selected character and voice, and the technical scope required for the venue, the company said.