Odysee Live
The Exhibition
A walk-in installation at HIT - Odysee's multi-agent architecture made into something you can hear, see, and take part in. For two weeks, visitors don't read about Odysee. They meet it.
01 - Vision
A companion, not an oracle
The installation is not a chatbot demo. It is a living visualization of the thesis claim itself, shown as an experience. Odysee is the system; Tico, the companion, is its voice. Tico is not a photorealistic human figure but a minimal mark - a circle with two eyes - that looks outward. The choice is deliberate: a human avatar would pose as a person, while the abstract mark keeps Tico honest - a companion that senses the world, not an entity pretending to be human.
It points at the world, not at you.
Tico points at what surrounds the visitor - time, place, weather, events - and never at their inner state. The principle is built into the space: the installation has no camera. An earlier version considered presence-detection to wake Tico; it was removed for privacy - and that refusal is the argument in physical form. The conversation opens with a button press, on the visitor's initiative alone.
The departures-and-arrivals board behind the station - airport-style - is the central metaphor: a system that points at the world outside. When a visitor speaks with Tico, the agent architecture is revealed in the background in real time - which agent is handling what, and why.
02 - The Installation
Six elements, one experience
A printed departures-and-arrivals board filling a 3.6 × 2.4 m wall in English - the installation's central visual metaphor for a system that points at the world. Two 15″ screens float above it, cycling Tico's messages to departing and arriving travellers.
The live demo: a 32″ portrait screen carrying Tico's face, driven by a Mac mini M4, with a Jabra headset and a label printer to its right, on a small desk. Two buttons on an enclosure below the screen open the conversation and print the keepsake; the "boarding-pass" cards sit in a stand to the left.
A 40″ screen, driven by a Mac mini, cycling through designed screens about the project - static mockups, nothing live - including the intro film, the homepage, the agent visualization, and the Odysee 2030 page.
A single 120×80 cm poster in the Odysee design system, printed on matte stock - wall-mounted or on a stand.
A low pedestal holding the printed book under a focused downlight - the full record of the research and design.
A cellular modem, network switch, cabling and power, with supplementary LED accents on select elements.
03 - Visitor Experience
Six steps
Activate
The visitor presses the button. Tico wakes - a gentle animation and a spoken greeting. On the visitor's initiative alone, with no sensors identifying them.
Dream
"Where have you always wanted to go?" The visitor answers freely; the turn closes when they finish speaking. AGT-01 begins profiling in the background.
Live Planning
A map takes shape. Day-by-day activities appear in real time as AGT-02 builds the itinerary. The agent arcs glow.
Cultural Discovery
Tico offers a phrase in the destination's language, with pronunciation and cultural context. AGT-06 runs live.
Architecture Reveal
The agent map animates in the background - showing which agents fired and why. The system explains itself, and the visitor leaves with a visual understanding of how it worked for them.
Personal Takeaway
At the end, the visitor chooses to take a souvenir. A press generates a designed itinerary document, a QR code appears on screen to scan, and a sticker prints for the "boarding-pass" card. Initiated by the visitor - never pushed.
04 - Under the Hood
The conversation pipeline
Every spoken word passes through a four-layer chain. The end-to-end target is under four seconds - the threshold below which conversation feels natural; in practice, measured latency runs around 2.9 seconds. Claude streaming lets ElevenLabs begin speaking before the answer is fully formed, saving roughly two seconds of perceived wait. Everything is coordinated by a local FastAPI server over WebSocket.
Instead of a human avatar, Tico is a minimal on-screen mark - a circle with two eyes - moving between five states: Wake, Idle, Curious, Speaking, Thinking. The mouth appears only while speaking. This is not a technical compromise but a stance: a photorealistic figure would pose as a person and invite the uncanny valley, while the abstract mark keeps Tico honest - a voice that accompanies, not a face that pretends.
05 - The Takeaway
A souvenir, taken - never pushed
At the end of the conversation, the visitor can take a designed itinerary document. The mechanism is built and working: on a press, the server assembles the itinerary points already gathered during the conversation, renders them to a designed PDF with Playwright (HTML→PDF), uploads it to Cloudflare R2, and shows a QR code on screen to scan. If desired, a QR sticker prints onto a "boarding-pass" card.
It is designed to fail gracefully: if copy generation fails, a deterministic document is produced rather than blocking the takeaway, and files auto-delete after 14 days. Like the removed camera, the action is initiated by the visitor and never pushed by the system.