is a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
Razer’s Project Ava AI game coach from last year’s CES is taking a new form for 2026: a tiny holographic anime girl in a capsule you can put on your desk. Anime girls in pods were already a thing at CES 2025, but Razer’s take on it is much smaller and desk-friendly. The new Project Ava is a 5.5-inch animated hologram that can take the form of Kira, an anime waifu in a green dress and black thigh-high socks, or Zane, a muscled dude covered in snake tattoos. Razer plans to add other avatars later, including real people like esports star Faker, or you can opt for a nonhuman glowing orb of light.
Project Ava avatars are designed to have “natural movements, eye-tracking, facial expressions, and lip sync for engaging interaction.” But what’s most important is what they’re constantly looking at: your screen and you, via Project Ava’s own built-in webcam and even the webcam on your own computer.
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1 / 3 Kira, Razer’s anime girl avatar.
These AI avatars watch you and what’s on your screen to answer your questions, give you gaming tips as you play, help with brainstorming or problem solving, and, according to Razer, even help with wardrobe tips and fit checks. You can talk to it via its dual-array mics by holding down a custom key binding, like a side mouse button. When you do that, you’re talking to Grok, which is the LLM Razer had set up for the demo I got to see. Razer reps claim that the vision is for Project Ava to be AI agnostic, allowing you to pick the model that’s feeding it, but for now it’s Grok, which is in the middle of its own gross crisis. And boy did my short demo feel Grok-y.
Razer allowed me to try Project Ava for a few minutes, and I came away gritting my teeth, thinking that this is going to be Microsoft’s Copilot AI ads all over again — but with an anime waifu avatar now involved, it has the potential to be gross.
I spoke to Kira for my demo, and it started off with “Wow! New face at the Razer booth? Love it! How should I call you?” (Razer preprogrammed this CES theme for the starting prompts.) It understood my name and addressed me as Antonio. Then it asked if I’d seen anything cool at CES, to which I gave a deadpan “No.” After I no-sold the bot on its excitement level, it moved on to its extended preamble, which quickly turned awkward.
“I’m Kira, from Project Ava by Razer, powered by Animation Inc. dot com. I’ve got friends in the project, but today it’s me and Zane. I’m the prettiest, just for you. Haha!”
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