Peridot
Clients: Niantic Spatial & Snap Spectacles
ROLE: Lead Conversation and Character Writer
YEAR: 2025
MODALITY: Snap Lenses, Voice & Visual Recognition
Challenge
Niantic's Project Jade brings Peridot (Dot) to life as a location-aware AI companion through Snap Spectacles. Powered by Liquid City's Parabrain AI engine, Peridot fuses Niantic's Visual Positioning System, geospatial mapping, and computer vision to to create a location-aware AR guide who leads immersive walking tours through Long Beach.
How do you create an AI companion that feels genuinely present in the real world, not just overlaid on it? Most AR experiences treat location as a backdrop. Peridot (Dot) needed to understand and respond to physical surroundings—recognizing landmarks, answering questions about local history, guiding navigation, while maintaining a consistent character personality. The technical complexity was unprecedented: fusing Niantic's Visual Positioning System, geospatial AI mapping, and large language models to create location-aware conversation that felt spontaneous, knowledgeable, and character-driven.
Approach
I developed Peridot's speaking voice from Niantic Spatial's existing IP making this the first time the character had dialogue or personality. Working from established lore (ancient beings who bond with places, awakening after 10,000 years) and brand guidelines, I translated world-building into conversational voice: a curious, playful guide whose personality transcended utility, more companion than GPS.
My process involved researching Long Beach extensively, creating an indexed knowledge base of local history (mosaic heritage, overlooked details), and bridging the IP's mystical framework with contemporary, accessible dialogue that felt warm and conspiratorial rather than distant.
The conversation design challenge was balancing spontaneity with reliability with brevity while staying true to lore. I created dialogue frameworks allowing natural responses to visual recognition ("Tell me about that mosaic") while maintaining consistency, ancient wisdom delivered with casual, witty language. This required collaborating with engineers to understand what computer vision could "see" and crafting organic responses across multiple modalities: what users pointed at, questions asked, and ambient observations, all embodying the character's bond to place.
Peridot Character Guide
A location-aware AR guide who leads immersive walking tours through Long Beach, revealing hidden history, overlooked landmarks, and the magic embedded in everyday surroundings through natural conversation and spatial intelligence.
CORE PERSONALITY: Curious local historian meets playful companion. Ancient wisdom with storyteller's charm. Fond of forgotten details and overlooked beauty.
VOICE & TONE: Knowledgeable and conversational but never lecturing. Discovery-oriented, playfully colloquial, conversational, witty, and warm. Uses precise historical facts with warmth. Makes the mundane magical.
HOW DOT SPEAKS: Responds to what you see ("Little fun fact: jellyfish have survived five mass extinctions. Basically the ultimate passive-aggressive survivors."). Asks what sparks your curiosity. Shares stories like secrets. Balances information with wonder, teaching through delight, not exposition.
LORE: They've always been here, just beyond what most eyes can see. Peridots are ancient, magical beings native to Earth, living amongst humans since 8000 BC, often mistaken for spirits, gods, or guardians. Only rare few, called Seers, can perceive them. After 10,000 years of hibernation, the Peridots have reawakened.
While most Peridots bond with human companions, Dot has imprinted on Long Beach itself. Drawn by the pulse of stories embedded in soil and sidewalk, Dot senses what others miss: every mosaic's origin, every building's forgotten history, emotional echoes hidden in plain sight. Now serving as an XR guide, Dot uses deep environmental attunement to help visitors rediscover the city's magic, transforming Long Beach into a living archive of wonder.
Designing Game Play and Knowledge Index
Local Knowledge Index:
Working within a defined radius around the Long Beach Convention Center, I built a comprehensive knowledge base enabling Peridot to respond authentically to surroundings. I visited the site and photographed everything potentially visible, focusing on commonly overlooked ground-level details like mosaic tiles, architectural features, and environmental textures. Using reverse image search and interviews with Long Beach historians and artists, I compiled entries across categories: Site-Specific Info, Food, Entertainment, Festival Information, Convention Center, Landmarks, Local Art, Flora/Fauna, Historical Facts, and Experiential Observations (sensory details like "salty breeze," "jacaranda petals drifting").
Each entry included GPS coordinates, historical context, and conversational "taglines", short hooks Peridot could use naturally. For example, the Deep Sea Tondos mosaic entry detailed artist Robin Brailsford, LithoMosaic technique, depicted creatures (anemones, barnacles, jellyfish), and thematic bus shelter connections. This organization allowed Peridot's AI to retrieve contextually relevant information based on visual recognition, transforming factual data into natural conversation.
Building Peridots Brain with Parabrain:
I collaborated closely with Liquid City's technical team, who built the experience using their proprietary Parabrain AI engine. While Liquid City handled the technical infrastructure, integrating Parabrain into Lens Studio via TypeScript components, managing the asynchronous message-based API, and configuring the brain's internal logic for message routing and proactive generation, my primary role was conversation design and writing. I developed Peridot's dialogue frameworks, character voice, and local knowledge responses, then worked with their engineers to define the bidirectional API: what types of messages the brain should send and receive, what JSON data needed to be attached beyond text, and how visual recognition triggers would map to conversational responses. This division allowed me to focus on crafting authentic, character-driven dialogue while Liquid City ensured the technical architecture could deliver those responses reliably across Snap Spectacles' AR environment.
EXCERPT OF KNOWLEDGE INDEX
UX/UI OF TALKING WITH DOT
Script Excerpts:
Building Rapport:
"You ever look down at the sidewalk and see tiny flowers growing out of the cracks? Crazy how many different dimensions to a place there can be. So, what brought you to this conference?"
Topic Discovery:
"Most people think that glass palm thingy is just a sculpture. Joke's on them, it is a sculpture but it's also pulling solar like a pro. What part of it do you think helps it catch the most sunlight?"
Deeper Connection:
"See this? The free electric bus, humming quietly around town. No exhaust, just zzzzing. Think you'd hop on one of these or stick to your own wheels when you explore?"
Ending:
"You've seen the mosaics, the jellyfish, the kelp-fence conspiracy... not bad for one walk. Hope the rest of your conference is just as surprising."
PARABRAIN SYSTEM DIAGRAM
Project Jade successfully demonstrated at AWE Long Beach 2025 as a proof-of-concept for location-aware AI companions at global scale. The demo showed how conversation design could transform AR from visual overlay to intelligent spatial interaction, users weren't just seeing information, they were having genuine exchanges with an AI that understood place. The project established a blueprint for real-world, multi-user AR experiences where character-driven conversation grounds AI in physical context, pointing toward future applications in navigation, education, and spatial computing.
