Kikibouba turns creator content into interactive characters that live on a fan's desktop. Creators can turn recorded or live performances into background-free video avatars, shaped cutouts and animated sprites, then add props, overlays, effects, audience choices and scheduled content drops. Fans use a desktop app to move, manage and interact with the creators they follow.
The project explores another way for creators to share short performances with their audience. Support links go to the creator's own pages; Kikibouba does not handle payments. It is currently a working prototype.
Each appearance has a beginning and an end. A creator might show a technique, reveal something or ask a question, then leave the desktop clear when the clip finishes. Keeping an appearance short is part of making it comfortable to have on screen.
The app calls an installed character an Avatar. A Show groups its appearances, a Moment is one appearance, and an Asset is a video, image, sound or other file used in it.
Record from a webcam. You get a 3‑2‑1 countdown and a 30‑second cap, because short loops are the point; the camera is released the moment you leave the view, so the light never stays on. Or build the shot in OBS and record its Virtual Camera; the app finds that exact device and stays on it.
The default is matting: an AI model on your own machine traces which pixels are you, hair and soft edges included. It cuts real pixels out; it never generates a new picture of your face. Green-screen keying is optional, and you can stack the two. No frame of video leaves the computer.
Sometimes the background is the point. Video shape crops the clip to a rectangle, rounded frame, circle, or oval, keeping the original scene inside and transparency outside. Drag it on the preview, resize, soften the edge. It's a plain geometric crop on the clip you already have, so it lands instantly.
A trimmed clip can become a frame-by-frame animated sprite, generated on the device and checked against the real finished atlas before it lands in your library. Scope is deliberately modest: one clip, one animation.
Most of the engineering went into three things that are easy to get subtly wrong.
A cutout has half-transparent pixels at every edge, and those pixels still carry the colour of the old room. That's the faint rim people describe as "I can see edges around it." So the pipeline solves for the true foreground colour. A Bake step then burns the result into the clip once, offline, where it can take as many passes as the edge needs.
A split preview shows the original beside the cutout. A checkerboard behind the cutout makes transparent areas and rough edges easier to inspect before the clip is used over a real desktop.
The overlay is a tight stage box, no bigger than the character plus whatever panel is open, and it starts fully click-through: clicks pass to the window underneath. It becomes interactive only when the pointer is genuinely over the character, then goes back to being scenery. Skipping any of that would leave a window that blocks the desktop under it.
Kikibouba never processes fan payments. Support buttons deep-link to pages the creator already owns, and the app discloses where a link goes before opening it. Poll and action clicks stay local to the fan's machine and never invent audience activity, so a creator can't be shown numbers that aren't real. The spec's rule is blunt: a visible action must work end to end, be disabled with a prerequisite you can satisfy, or not be there.
A desktop build on Electron (v33, Windows-first): the fan-facing Player and its transparent, frameless overlay, with the local Creator Studio launched separately. Renderers are plain ES modules that run straight from disk, so it all works offline with no bundler or framework in the stack. A --smoke start-up flag creates both windows hidden and reports pass or fail, so a broken build fails loudly.
The next planned step is to move the Creator Studio to a hosted web app. The desktop app would then focus on playing and managing the characters a fan follows. Reply drafting is also planned, with a person reviewing each message before it is sent.
It was called Deskmates. Kikibouba is the product name now, but the rename stopped at the surface on purpose: the deskmates.* API namespace, the deskmate:// protocol, and the .deskmate package and data files keep their original identifiers. Those are compatibility contracts; renaming them would break existing clients and creator content for no user-visible gain.