CES 2026 has been boring. Another year of thinner TVs and earbuds that promise better battery life but still die mid-flight. I was ready to head back to on my house when Razer dropped a surprise in Hall 6: Project Ava.
Picture this. A sleek 5.5‑inch transparent cylinder sits on your desk like a tiny lighthouse. Inside, a glowing 3D avatar named Kira or Zane looks back at you through a holographic display. It rotates, blinks and speaks. This isn’t just a screen. It feels alive.
Let’s be honest. You want one. I want one. It’s the Blade Runner fantasy come to life, minus the dystopia. But after spending time reading Razer’s press materials. I came to a different realization. Project Ava is a beautiful trap. It’s the kind of device that makes you feel like you’re living in the future until you notice the price you’re paying in privacy.
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The Specs: What You Are Actually Buying
Project Ava isn’t just a fancy display. The hardware is real. It has a transparent OLED panel that renders 3D avatars in real time, eye‑tracking cameras that follow your every move, and far‑field microphones that can hear you from across the room. The cylinder itself weighs about 400 grams and connects via USB‑C to your gaming rig.
Razer calls it both a gaming coach and a life organizer. In gaming mode, your avatar reads your screen and feeds you weapon stats, cooldown timers and tactical advice. Playing Valorant? Kira tells you the enemy’s economy. Grinding Elden Ring? Zane warns you about attack patterns before they happen.
Outside of games, Project Ava manages your calendar, reads your emails aloud and syncs with your smart home. The demo video shows someone asking Zane to dim the lights and order food while mid‑raid. It makes the Rabbit R1 look like a toy from 2024. This is premium tech and Razer knows it.
But then I read the fine print.
The PC Vision Feature: Your Desktop’s New Voyeur
Here’s where things change. To coach you effectively, Project Ava needs to see your screen. Razer calls this PC Vision Mode.
Here’s how it works. The device uses a built‑in camera to watch your monitor. It doesn’t use screenshots or software overlays. It physically looks at your screen, capturing everything that appears. The benefit is that it works with any game or app without needing special integrations.
The problem? It doesn’t just see Call of Duty. It sees your Discord messages, your bank login if you switch tabs and your personal documents. It sees everything on your screen as long as PC Vision is active.
Razer says the data is processed locally where possible, but its own documentation admits that advanced features like natural language coaching rely on cloud processing. This means your screen data could be sent to remote servers for analysis before the response comes back from Kira or Zane.
Why I Am Not Pre‑Ordering: The Sovereign AI Argument
I’ve spent months building a Mac Mini AI server precisely to avoid this kind of setup. Running AI locally keeps data private and under your control. Project Ava is built around the opposite idea. It’s a centralized, always-online device right on your desk.
Razer makes great hardware, but Project Ava is not just hardware. It’s a cloud product. Your gameplay footage, your commands, your screenshots all flow through Razer’s servers. You’re not only buying a device. You’re joining a service that can be changed, discontinued or accessed by others.
Now think about Razer Synapse, the software that controls their devices. If you’ve used it. You know it can be buggy and intrusive. It’s always online, tracks usage data and has a reputation for poor stability. Now imagine giving that software eyes through eye‑tracking and screen capture. Would you trust that?
For professional gamers, the calculation might be different. If shaving milliseconds off reaction times helps win tournaments, maybe the privacy risk feels worth it. But for the rest of us for creators, writers and freelancers. It’s a different story. I don’t need a glowing coach that can see my passwords.
The Verdict: Wait for the Jailbreak
Here’s the frustrating part. The hardware is brilliant. If this thing could run local models like Mistral or Llama 3.3 offline I’d buy it immediately. Imagine an open‑source version where the avatar runs fully on your computer with no data leaving your network. Imagine flashing custom firmware that trains your own coach privately on your own games.
That’s the device I’d love to own.
But that’s not what Razer is selling right now. What’s on offer is a $300 spy disguised as a desk companion. It’s futuristic, beautiful and designed to extract your data in exchange for convenience.
Razer built an incredible body, but it comes with a corporate soul.
Privacy Score:
Design: 10/10 | Privacy: 5/10
Keep Your Desk Dumb and Your AI Private
Until the developer community finds a way to jailbreak Project Ava and make it fully local, I suggest holding off. If you want a smart assistant without surveillance, check out my guide on building a private voice assistant with Ollama and a Raspberry Pi. It might not have a holographic anime companion, but at least it’s truly yours.
And that kind of ownership still matters more than ever.
