PAW PALS CONNECT

JANUARY 2025 · AUGMENTED REALITY

Winner of Best Use of Apple Vision Pro at MIT Reality Hack 2025

Paw Pals Connect is an AR app that lets you raise a personalized virtual puppy. It connects you with nearby users based on your mood and interests, creating meaningful, real-world social interactions.

PawPals was developed by our team to explore how extended reality could foster companionship and ease feelings of loneliness. Inspired by the simple joy of people connecting through their pets, we set out to design an application that recreates those organic interactions in a digital space.

The application allows up to ten users to colocalize and interact with each other’s pets in shared augmented reality. Users can talk naturally to the pets, which respond intelligently through an off-cloud Large Language Model. This enables behaviors like pathfinding with semantic awareness — for instance, a pet recognizes a chair and knows it can jump onto it — creating interactions that feel intuitive and lifelike.

As the project’s creative lead, I sourced and created 3D assets to bring the pets to life, ensuring the visual design enhanced the sense of warmth and playfulness. I also contributed on the development side, working in Unity to optimize the application and ensure smooth functionality on the Apple Vision Pro. We leveraged the open-source multimodal agent framework Estuary to power responsive, context-aware pet behaviors, resulting in an immersive experience that blends technical innovation with emotional connection.

Learn more here: https://devpost.com/software/paw-pals-connect