Building a Haunted House with NVIDIA Nemotron Open Models
The post describes MonsterHouse, a Halloween projection in which a grumpy pirate-themed garage door talks to trick-or-treaters and softens when they are polite. The character runs on one workstation using NVIDIA's open tools for speech, language and facial animation.
What the article says
On October 30, 2026, NVIDIA published a post on the Hugging Face blog describing MonsterHouse, an interactive Halloween installation built by one of its employees. A garage door is given a mouth and a grumpy personality, complete with a pirate-ship backstory, that complains at trick-or-treaters but softens when they say please or thank you. The project doubles as a showcase for NVIDIA's open models and its Nemotron Voice Agent blueprint.
The whole system runs on a single workstation. It combines Nemotron Speech ASR for listening, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B with a LoRA adapter for personality, Magpie TTS Zeroshot for the voice, Audio2Face-3D in Unreal Engine 5 for the animated mouth, and an optional vision layer that describes costumes. The author reports a median delay of 1.70 seconds from the end of speech to audio, and 0.72 seconds for cached replies. The MonsterHouse code itself is not released, but developers can follow a six-step path to build their own local conversational character. The author admits that the vision test was synthetic and that the animation can still be improved.
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