Razer-NUS AI Lab Moves Holographic Companion AVA Closer to Reality

Razer has been talking about AVA, its holographic desk companion, since January, when the transparent block of light first appeared at CES in Las Vegas. What it lacked was a research engine to make that demo feel like a product. On Aug 5, the Singapore gaming giant moved a step closer, opening the Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab with the National University of Singapore — a facility dedicated to the AI models that will power in-game and real-life conversations, tasks, and yes, the kind of digital companions that make Tamagotchi look like a first draft.

The lab, housed at NUS, will host around 20 PhD and postdoctoral AI researchers with direct access to Razer's engineering department to validate real-world uses. Both sides fund operations jointly and co-own the intellectual property created. "Digital avatars, like Tamagotchi, are not new. What we're doing now is to take things to the next level," said Razer's chief strategy officer Li-Meng Lee at the launch.

The first products riding on this research are already in motion. AVA, a 5.5-inch hologram display with in-built cameras and microphones, is currently a prototype running on xAI's Grok — with a feature in development to let users switch between AI models of their choice. More than 15,000 potential buyers have put down US$20 deposits, and an undisclosed number of beta testers in English-speaking countries are stress-testing its multi-step task execution and data boundaries. At the launch, its holographic character Kira introduced herself, suggested restaurants for dinner, and calculated drive times from NUS to Changi Airport.

Razer also used the event to show Project Motoko, a wearable AI headset with cameras that scan the user's environment and offer advice via whichever model the user picks — OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. In one demo, Motoko suggested a recipe from a list of ingredients, estimated calorie counts, and translated a Japanese menu in real time. It enters a crowded field where Meta and Google are already pushing smart glasses, but Lee argues the market is big enough: "Headsets are already being used by young people. We want to enhance the experience, increase the battery life and reduce the latency." Neither product has a launch date or price.

Why it matters for Singapore: This is a homegrown company betting that consumer AI hardware — not just chatbots and enterprise software — can be designed and built here. The lab keeps frontier research onshore, plugs NUS academics into a live commercial engineering environment, and extends Razer's existing AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore. For a city-state chasing AI product leadership, the Razer-NUS lab is a reminder that Singapore wants to own the hardware layer of the AI boom, not just the services.