OK peeps, I have some more progress to report, maybe even a major breakthrough. I surmise that with this concept, there's now enough basic information for a new dev who's never had any previous experience with waifu development to meaningfully contribute to the project on a technical level, which is good, because that dev is me.
Holowaifu Movement Solved (Maybe)
I thought of a possible way to govern the holowaifu's movement, and it includes the possibility of dynamically creating movements on the fly to make the waifu feel more realistic. It's similar to the idea I came up with for robowaifu martial arts. Basically it involves using an AI video model to create her movements, but there are a few important caveats to this. The "prompt" would be either voice commands issued by the user, or the waifu would use the footage from the visor itself as an image/video prompt. Because the waifu needs to react in real time and this is an AR visor we're talking about, with processing power equivalent to a smartphone (because in many cases the visor will actually be a smartphone attached to a headset), the model would have to be a very stripped-down model optimized for speed rather than enormous amounts of artistic detail. If the visor isn't powerful enough to run the model fast enough for real-time reactions, the model could be run on a laptop or desktop that streams its output to the visor.
Of course it would be helpful to have a set of standardized movements rather than having to constantly have the AI create new movements, but implementing each movement as a state in a state machine program could rapidly become unmanageable. Therefore I've decided to simplify the program's architecture to include only 3 states, IDLE, SEARCH and REACTION. Whenever the waifu needs to generate a movement, the program runs a search to see if any of the existing animations in its database are suitable for the prompt, and if a suitable animation is found, it runs. If a suitable animation isn't found, the AI video model creates a new animation. But the AI video capabilities are very rarely necessary, particularly for the prototype version.
The search algorithm is the key here, because it relieves much of the processing demand of having to come up with new animations. It's also more efficient than a program with dozens or hundreds of possible states representing the waifu's behavior. Most likely the first version won't feature the AI video model at all, merely a placeholder in the code to incorporate it in the future, so the REACTION state won't be used until the AI video capabilities can be properly integrated. DeepSeek suggested using tags for each animation, like hashtags on social media, to assign the context needed for the search algorithm to determine which animation is appropriate. It might also be good to assign weights to the tags so more frequently needed animations show up more often, but that seems like something you'd build in later and not something you need for a proof of concept.
I probably should have thought of incorporating the search algorithm back when I was first theorizing about robowaifu martial arts. I didn't think of it because I had the idea that the robowaifu always needs to use AI to find the best counter to enemy attacks, and nothing else would be good enough to let her adapt to a canny human opponent. Because of that, conserving processing power didn't really seem important; having a more combat-capable robowaifu was the priority regardless of the processing overhead. But a holowaifu doesn't physically exist, except if you use AR to overlay her onto a robowaifu or doll, and even then she can easily be detached from it, so she doesn't need to be capable of fighting. Maintaining proper balance while walking isn't an issue either, so the search space of animations can be shrunk dramatically.
Part of the reason I've been posting infrequently since I finished laying out the details of my concept is because I've been busy with other things, but the other part is that I just got stonewalled when I tried to figure out how to govern the waifu's behavior without writing a clunky garbage program with over 9000 states that would be impossible to maintain and would run like shit, especially on an AR headset where you need to optimize because you just don't have the power of a high-end gaming machine. I couldn't tell you how I thought of this solution. But the search function isn't really any different than searching for images or videos by hashtag on a website.
The most important part of this idea is that it's actionable in terms of writing code, so the next big post I make will contain my attempt at vibe-coding this. But I'd like to get some feedback on this first, because not being an experienced programmer, things like knowing when to use a given search algorithm or how to set up a video database are foreign to me.