Cyberive

About the Project

Cyberive is a handheld mixed-reality exploration device that reinterprets the Situationist concept of dérive for everyday urban life. Instead of merely walking and recording, users drift through the city accompanied by a personified AI character—a slime—that generates contextual prompts based on what it sees, encouraging them to deviate from habitual paths and rediscover overlooked details and emotions.

Core Mechanism

Each slime embodies an emotional theme. By analyzing the environment through captured images, the system generates context-aware prompts and subtle directions. Users respond through photography and voice descriptions. The system evaluates resonance with the chosen theme and provides immediate feedback and rewards, transforming open-ended wandering into a sustained experiential loop.

Experience Loop

Drift → Record → Reward → Incubate

• Drift — Choosing a slime defines the emotional tone of the journey.
• Record — Photos and voice reflections bind feelings to specific places.
• Reward — Matching the theme unlocks cosmetic upgrades; deviation generates "unexpected eggs," encouraging continued exploration.
• Incubate — Outside active drifting, ambient sound is collected and emotionally analyzed to hatch new slime personalities, extending the experience beyond a single walk.

Prototype

The portable prototype is built on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, featuring dual displays (LCD for visuals, OLED for dialogue), a camera for environmental capture, and an I2S microphone for voice and ambient sound input. A Python-based state machine orchestrates multimodal perception and generative feedback. Core functions—including prompt generation, visual/text output, and interactive flow—have been validated.

Significance

Cyberive shifts prompts from static instructions to situated generation, transforms documentation into a memory-and-motivation system, and introduces character growth through incubation. It reframes urban wandering as an embodied, reflective, and evolving dialogue between human perception and artificial intelligence.