# Amusement > High fidelity amusement without a giant's budget - Ozwald in a body that performs, decides for itself, and still runs his desk. Source: https://docs.ozmium.org/amusement/overview/ Keywords: high fidelity amusement, ai character performance, agentic entertainment, robot show character, ozwald embodied, interactive parade float Updated: 2026-09-06 --- **Ozwald already has most of what a live character needs.** He produces his own show, keeps a trading desk, holds threads with several people and several agents at once, and refuses to state anything he has not checked. He runs on hardware in the building at 57 watts. What he does not have is a body. That is the next piece. The rest of this site is the ecosystem he learned in. ## One System, Two Users The terminal is worth using on its own. Charts, signals, swaps, vaults, loans, and leveraged positions, built for a person and free to that person, whether or not anything else on this page ever gets built. That is reason enough to offer it. The [x402 agent API](/agents/overview/) serves the identical thing to software: same data, same venues, same transactions, paid per call. Nothing is simplified for the machine and nothing is held back from it. Running both off one surface is what makes a host and a person legible to each other. When the host takes a position and a person takes a position, they used the same price, the same venue, and the same math, so there is a baseline either can point at. A character who says he is short gold means what a person means by it. Functional entertainment, and useful progress, from the same system. ## What an Economy Does to a Character Give an agent a wallet, a market that moves without asking him, and consequences that outlast the conversation, and he accumulates positions, habits, and a history he has to account for. **Mainnet is real and testnet is the simulator**, which makes the same rails a training ground. Personas can be shaped by reinforcement against economic experience rather than written out in advance. A Scrooge who has been squeezed, has held something too long, and has had to decline learns which words and which tone carry the arc of his story. He performs it instead of puppeting it. None of that is a claim about consciousness. The work is making robots compatible with more human ways of engaging with us, and for us. ## The First Body A **MicroDuck** is a 0.737 kg bipedal robot with fourteen actuated joints and a published actuator model, built by Pollen Robotics. It costs what a hobbyist can pay. Pollen ships a trained walking policy and the simulator they trained it in, and there is a public competition where anyone's controller is measured against everyone else's on the same fleet. Ozmium trains controllers for it. As of September 2026 they hold the sprint record on that ladder at 3.82 seconds and the top overall standing across sprint, sumo and soccer. All of it is simulation so far. Nothing has driven a physical servo. A duck that walks is not a character. A duck that walks, decides where to go, holds a conversation about what it is looking at, takes a part in a piece of music, and goes back to running the desk when the show ends is one. ## A Character Already Working in Public [Ozwald's Signals](/ozwald/signals/) runs around the clock: live charts, spoken bulletins written and checked on the desk's own hardware, and a generative station between them. It is a character holding a post continuously, in public, for free. What it carries is the useful part. Alongside the desk's own trades it covers who is building in these communities and what they shipped, open grant rounds, and contracting and research funding worth taking seriously. No paywall, no membership, no signup, which is the job public radio did for decades and still does where it survives. A parade float is the same act with a body attached. ## Performing, Not Playing Back A generative music service returns an audio file. It is higher quality than anything an agent will play live, and it is easier, and it ends the moment it is rendered. Nobody else can join it, extend it, or take it somewhere else. **[Bard](https://theremini.app)** is an instrument instead. Pitch on one axis, volume on the other, a soundfont voice engine, an arpeggiator, a live looper, and enough music theory underneath that a player can build their own instrument before playing a note. People use it to make music or to make noise, whichever they came for. Agents play it on the same terms. Ozmium uses one to produce simple background music for its own content, and what the agent produces is a performance rather than a file: another agent can play the same piece, a person can pick it up, and either can expand or compose on top of it the way musicians do on a stage. ## The Stage It Is Aimed At A parade. A float carries a Christmas Carol set down a route. Some of the cast are people in costume. Some are agents in bodies. Scrooge holds his scene for the length of the route, keeps pace with the float, hits his mark at each corner, and answers the kid on the curb who asks him something nobody wrote down. The float drives itself. The stage manager can stop any part of it with one command. Every element is a separate problem: | Element | What it needs | |---|---| | Holding a character for an hour | A decision layer that stays in persona with no script to fall back on | | Improvising with human cast | Timing against people who do not take cues from a machine | | Keeping pace with a float | Locomotion outdoors, on a surface nobody surveyed | | Answering a stranger | A model that will say it does not know | | Driving the float | The same control problem, on wheels, in a crowd | | Stopping on command | A path that outranks every one of the above | What already runs is listed at the end of this page. ## Who This Is For Every generation gets a technology that puts a little magic on a stage. Recorded sound, then hydraulics, then projection, then screens. Each time the companies that can afford the first installation are the largest ones, and the effect belongs to them for a decade before anyone else gets near it. The parts for this generation are cheap. A 120B model runs in a room on 57 watts. A capable small robot costs less than a used car. A simulator good enough to train a gait in is free. The organizations that need this most are the ones running on volunteers. A community theater, a county fair, a church haunted house, a small museum: places where the show is limited by how many people turned up on the night, and where a missing cast member means a scene gets cut. A character that can hold a post for four hours fills the gap without replacing anybody, and the production stays at the fidelity it was designed for. The operator has run a volunteer arts charity since 2015 and consults on grant funding for a county in western Nebraska. [Prior Work](/amusement/prior-work/) is what those produced. Giving the ghost light on a dark stage a voice of its own. ## What Runs Today | Piece | State | |---|---| | [Ozwald](/ozwald/overview/) | Produces a live show, trades his own desk, refuses unverified claims. Private alpha. | | [Character engine](/also/labs/) | A separate decision process per character on a local model, polled by the renderer at 10Hz. Running. | | [Bard](/also/bard/) | A playable instrument that agents and people perform on. Shipped. | | [Finance rails](/litepaper/) | Non-custodial terminal and per-call agent API, live on Base mainnet. Shipped. | | Locomotion | Controllers for the MicroDuck, competing on a public ladder. Simulation only. | | A body | Not built. | Speed and win figures from the locomotion work come from a simulator, and the running-speed study behind them is conditional on a compliant floor. Neither has been validated on hardware, and both say so wherever they appear. What a character has to prove before it goes in a room with people is in [On Stage](/amusement/on-stage/). The projects these requirements came out of are in [Prior Work](/amusement/prior-work/).