Apple Vision Pro might be getting intelligent digital pets soon

Vietnam-based startup Bootloader Studio has been working on the project since 2022. The company recently showed their work to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who praised Vietnam’s developer community on X.

Bootloader Studio’s digital pets will use AI to read a person’s emotions and react accordingly. This takes a concept like the virtual pets on Meta Quest 3 to a whole new level. Using AI will allow these digital pets to keep track of a myriad of factors to figure out a person’s mood.

Pelz also talked about the decision of making virtual pets and not people. He said he didn’t want to give users another Alexa or Siri. Bootloader Studio’s digital pets will coexist with other running applications on the headset and stay by your side as ever-present companions.

As XR gets more widely adopted (I hope) and AI gets incorporated into more and more things, we can expect to see more competition in this space. There are already apps for AI companions and virtual pets have existed for a long time. For example, Nintendo’s extremely popular Nintendogs for the Nintendo DS.

Intelligent digital pets are a really cool idea, but I think this is more a proof of concept. Not a lot of people will buy the Vision Pro given its cost. But this does give us a glimpse at how future AI-powered assistants like Google’s in-development Project Astra might function.

We’ll get a better look at Bootloader Studio’s app when it launches this Summer.