AOTO LED panels and Brompton processing formed the display system for an interactive AI installation at IMEX America 2026, an annual trade show for the meetings, incentives, conferences and events industry, held in Las Vegas in Las Vegas. Visitors could hold live conversations with on-screen characters. Unreal Engine 5 handled facial animation and lip-sync, while AI processing ran on a dedicated server in Spain.
The display measured 1.83m wide by 3.66m high and used AOTO RM1.5E panels. Visitors selected one of four characters through an iPad touchscreen and spoke into an Audio-Technica PRO49QL gooseneck microphone. A JBL stereo system reproduced the generated speech, while animated facial expressions and lip-sync provided the visual response. Directional voice capture and volume-threshold gates helped manage ambient exhibition noise.
A custom laptop ran Unreal Engine 5 for real-time facial animation and lip-sync at a specified 60fps. Its hardware included an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 memory, 96GB of DDR5 memory and a 4TB PCIe Gen 5 SSD. External liquid cooling was also part of the setup.
AI processing ran on a dedicated server in a data centre in Spain, equipped with eight NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs and 768GB of combined GPU memory. The server also featured dual AMD EPYC processors, 1TB of ECC system memory and enterprise NVMe storage. The software workflow linked speech recognition, response generation, voice synthesis and animation, allowing a character to begin speaking before its full answer had been generated.
The installation was developed by NewMedia Creative Technology Studio, which reported a median response time of 2.6 seconds between a visitor finishing speaking and the character beginning its reply.
An offline fallback included prerecorded answers and animations, alongside smaller AI models capable of running locally.
Diego De Anna, founder and CEO, NewMedia said: “The system does not wait for the complete answer before it begins speaking, which is why the response feels so immediate.”
The installation offered four character roles, ranging from company information and quizzes to playful exchanges and fictional predictions. Spoken responses were accompanied by live subtitles. According to the system’s records, 329 individual visitors took part in 402 conversations across Smart Monday and the three show days, with interactions in English and 25 other languages. NewMedia is developing versions of the system for trade shows, corporate events and other brand experiences.
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