Pulse

Pulse turns a portrait into a character that lives on a website: it breathes, looks, reacts and does something when you speak to it.

• Client: Orbit GmbH
• Built by: Orbit (Jan)

Pulse turns a portrait into a character that lives on a website: it breathes, looks, reacts and does something when you speak to it.

On most websites today a speech bubble waits in the bottom right corner. Providers such as Synthesia and HeyGen show how far rendered humans have come, but mostly as a finished video. Pulse takes a different approach: a brand uploads a portrait and gets a character that lives on its own website, with nothing but a script. In June 2026 Orbit lays out Pulse as a complete product design, from the home page through the studio and the scene editor to the pricing page, and turns it into an interface you can actually use. The hard part lies in the subject itself: a character in motion is video, and every scene has to end exactly where the next can begin. Otherwise it jumps, and a living being turns back into a clip.

• One portrait, a whole library • Five categories of scenes • A state machine as a constellation • Studio, editor and showroom • Approval before publishing • A backend for the pipeline • One script, one element • Pricing from zero to Scale

One portrait, many scenes

Every character begins as a portrait, and from it grows a library in five categories: idle, action, effect, transition and two-part scenes with entry, hold and exit. The sample scenes show Atlas, the first of eight characters, idle, with a holographic screen and under an energy shield, eight seconds each. Each begins and ends in the portrait, so the next follows seamlessly and the character never falls out of character.

No jump, no clip

A state machine decides which scene plays next. In the showroom it appears as a constellation of the five categories: a click flies to the chosen state, and a transition can be scrubbed with a slider, from idle through an impulse to entering cybernetic mode. A 3D viewer blends two videos together and keeps the portrait ready as a fallback in case a clip is ever missing. The character always remains a character.

A studio for living characters

Behind every character is a whole operation, and the design shows it in full: a board with all characters, an editor for their scenes, an approval step before publishing and a pipeline backend with queue, GPUs, renders, clients and quotas. The pricing page runs from a free entry tier to the Scale plan, switchable between monthly and annual billing. An automatic test run operates every view like a human and demands a visible result every time; anything that does nothing fails.

One script, one element

On a third-party website Pulse needs exactly two things: a script and an element. The script weighs just a few kilobytes, the element "pulse-avatar" points to the character's library, and only the next scene is ever loaded. No rebuild of the page, no heavy video up front: anyone who opens the page sees the portrait first, and seconds later it wakes up.

Atlas is waiting

Pulse is designed as a product and operable as an interface, with a database behind every number, even if those numbers still come from the design and not from live operation. What is missing is the core: the pipeline that creates scenes from an uploaded portrait. Whether and when it will be built is still open. Until then Atlas waits in his portrait, with a screen in his hand and a shield nobody has needed yet.