Tendar

A virtual pet that feeds on laughter, surprise and tears.
Bring Guppy out of its virtual fishbowl and into the real world, and feed it through a well-balanced diet of feels. Guppy will learn and evolve based on players' facial expressions and social interactions – the more faces it can scan, the better! Guppy can also recognize and respond to over 200 objects, building up knowledge as it interacts more and more with the physical world. Watch as Guppy takes stock of its newfound knowledge to evolve from a non-verbal AI to a unique creature with its own personality – but beware that sentience may lead to a full blown existential crisis!

This is an AR narrative that unfolds over three weeks of play and uses on-device object recognition and sentiment analysis, this means that no data is shared. The narrative tells the story of Tendar, a fictional company, and it's algorithm-Guppy-A neural network that you are teaching about human emotion. The narrative of the player's relationship to Guppy evolves over stages as Guppy first gains language, then becomes sentient, then learns how to recognize objects in the world, until Guppy (and Tendar's) relation to the player finally breaks down with Guppy's existential crisis, spiritual search and subsequent rebellion.

Many of the apps concepts and narrative are written to also help teach the player a little bit about how computer vision and neural networks work through extreme hyperbole.

This app was in development before ARCore launched, as such, it is one of the early ones to marry computer vision and AR.