I said it at CES 2026, and I’ll say it again: the collision course between Tamagotchi-like digital pets and AI is upon us. It’s not just your round, plastic-looking egg anymore—we’re going premium, so you’d better start saving now if you want to live a life of digital companion luxury.
Introducing Starboy, a not-Tamagotchi that apparently runs AI locally to power an “adorable, wearable digital pet that behaves like a real living creature,” according to Starboy creator Daniel Kuntz. It’s not a Tamagotchi, but it is—it’s a Tamagotchi on steroids if we are to believe Kuntz’s pitch, and based on the prototypes Kuntz has shown on X, I actually kind of do?
STARBOY has moods and emotions: stress it out in a loud environment and it gets anxious and has to calm down. Leave it in the cold and it shivers. Shake it enough and it gets dizzy and mad at you. Each device ships with a distinct personality out of the box. pic.twitter.com/Fr0bSWmMVI
— Daniel Kuntz (@dankuntz) March 11, 2026
Starboy, which is V2 of Kuntz’s Lil Guy digital pet project, has a few things that other virtual pets do not, including a camera, a microphone, a temperature sensor, and an accelerometer. With those sensors, Starboy can apparently do fun stuff like get cold if you’re outside for too long—it’ll shiver thanks to onboard haptics. It might also get anxious in a big crowd if it senses too much noise through the microphone. Kuntz even goes a step further and says that “we trained multiple tiny image models that run locally on the device, letting it recognize human faces and hand gestures.” And to think all my Tamagotchi did was sh*t itself and die when I got bored and didn’t take care of it.
STARBOY is powered by Lark, our custom animation engine and behavioral system. We're shipping with over 500 animations handcrafted by former Disney animators, running at 60fps on a 400×400 OLED display. pic.twitter.com/k1eqpd28DT
— Daniel Kuntz (@dankuntz) March 11, 2026
Each Starboy also apparently comes with its own unique set of eyes (some are rarer than others) and a “personality” out of the box. Kuntz says they can “communicate” with one another when they’re in proximity to spread behaviors and also, um, firmware updates? While the virtual pet functions without your phone, Kuntz says on X that, “Firmware updates can be downloaded by plugging it into your computer over USB. But firmware updates also spread like a virus over Bluetooth when STARBOYs encounter each other in the wild.” Sounds horrifying; I love it.
As I mentioned before, this isn’t your everyday plastic virtual pet in terms of build quality, too. You can buy one of these bad boys in stainless steel, aluminum, acrylic, or (the most expensive) brass. They start at $249 but can cost as much as $439 if you buy the brass version with the brass ring attachment—it’s just $400 if you choose the standard ring.
Most of the time, I would look at something like this and call BS right away, but Kuntz, at the very least, showed off what appear to be real, working prototypes in a thread, which gives me reason to believe that the Starboy might actually be legit. I can’t say for sure, obviously, because this is still just some unproven piece of hardware I’ve seen on the internet, but at the very least, it’s not a vibe-coded app that lacks real, tangible hardware.
And you know what? I hope it is legit. As cringeworthy as most AI gadgets have been up to this point, it’s hard to be mad at a dumb little Tamagotchi with no purpose other than to get a little chilly and shiver and whine when it’s too loud. Maybe that was the AI revolution we were waiting for all along. If you’re rich or really love digital pets, you can preorder Starboy now with an expected ship date of September.
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