Imex America: AI Host Combines LED, Real-Time Animation And AI

A 12-foot-tall digital character answered questions, delivered compliments and made fictional predictions at Imex America 2026 in Las Vegas, invidis reported. Newmedia Creative Technology Studio developed AI Host, letting visitors choose one of four animated characters for spoken conversations during the October 13–15 exhibition and its preceding Smart Monday.

The installation used a 6-by-12-foot LED wall of Aoto RM1.5E panels (1.5 mm pixel pitch, 1,500 nits, 7,680 Hz refresh), driven by Brompton processing, with Unreal Engine 5 handling real-time facial animation and lip-sync at 60 fps. Visitors selected characters on a 12.9-inch iPad and spoke through an Audio-Technica directional microphone; a JBL stereo system played responses.

The on-site computer paired an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and linked to Newmedia's AI servers in Spain for speech recognition and response generation. "The system does not wait for the complete answer before it begins speaking, which is why the response feels so immediate," said Diego De Anna, Newmedia's founder and CEO.

Locally stored responses, animations and smaller AI models kept the installation running during connectivity interruptions; the fallback covered four internet outages. Over four days Newmedia recorded 402 conversations among 329 visitors, supported English and 25 other languages, and logged more than 12 hours of live conversation.

82% of visitors greeted by a character responded, and the median gap between a visitor finishing a question and the character replying was 2.6 seconds. Newmedia is now offering customized versions of AI Host for trade shows, corporate events, museums and other brand experiences.