Imex America: AI Host Combines LED, Real-Time Animation And AI

A 12-foot-tall digital character was answering questions, delivering compliments and making fictional predictions at Imex America 2026 in Las Vegas. Behind the conversations was a system combining an Aoto LED wall, Brompton processing, Unreal Engine 5 and AI servers located thousands of miles away in Spain.

Newmedia Creative Technology Studio developed AI Host, which let visitors choose one of four animated characters and have spoken conversations during the October 13–15 exhibition and its preceding Smart Monday.

The installation used a 6-foot-wide by 12-foot-high LED wall built with Aoto RM1.5E panels, featuring a 1.5 mm pixel pitch, 1,500-nit brightness and a 7,680 Hz refresh rate. Brompton processing drove the display, while Unreal Engine 5 handled real-time facial animation and lip-sync at 60 frames per second.

Conversations powered from Spain

Visitors selected their characters using a 12.9-inch iPad and spoke through an Audio-Technica directional microphone. A JBL stereo system reproduced the characters’ responses, with subtitles displayed alongside the animation.

The on-site computer featured an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU. It worked with Newmedia’s AI infrastructure in Spain, where dedicated servers handled speech recognition, response generation and other processing tasks.

Rather than waiting for a full response, the system began speaking as it was being produced.

“The system does not wait for the complete answer before it begins speaking, which is why the response feels so immediate,” said Diego De Anna, Newmedia’s founder and CEO.

The installation also included locally stored responses, animations and smaller AI models to maintain operation during connectivity interruptions. According to Newmedia, the fallback system covered four internet outages during the event.

More than 400 conversations

Newmedia recorded 402 conversations involving 329 individual visitors over four days. The system supported interactions in English and 25 other languages, recording more than 12 hours of live conversation.

The four characters offered different experiences, ranging from industry discussions and quizzes to compliments and fictional predictions.

According to the studio, 82% of visitors greeted by a character responded, while the median time between a visitor finishing a question and the character beginning its reply was 2.6 seconds.

Newmedia is now offering customized versions of AI Host for trade shows, corporate events, museums and other brand experiences.