As a civil war survivor,

as an immigrant,

as an expat,

as a parent guilty of uprooting my daughters twice in two years,

as the father of a teen struggling with anxiety and social media addiction,

as an architect who knows the importance and symbolism of space,

as a toy designer who has seen kids naturally embrace the physical/digital duality of play,

I propose Beit (“home” in Arabic and Hebrew), a platform to create, store, and serve “portable playrooms”: online spaces filled with digital twins of our real life favorite toys, keepsakes, and other possessions.

Beit isn't yet another home decoration app, but an interoperable digital place designed to preserve objects and memories we own(ed) in real life.

Beit will be just a click away from within any website, game, metaverse, or digital experience.

There are various ways to transfer accessible objects to digital: a simple photo, a 3D scan, a library of existing 3D assets.

For the things we can't hold anymore, Beit.ai wants to build on the accelerating advances in Machine Learning and generative AI. We are developing a multi-lingual interface that allows anyone to build visual and 3D representations of their long lost object, space, or memory directly from a spoken or written memory prompt.

Remember when you turned 13 and your mom gave away your toys? Remember your favorite poster that hung on your old bedroom wall until you had to move? Remember your GI Joe’s? Your Barbie collection? Your first trike, your last skateboard, the bracelet your childhood crush gave you, the empty VHS box you hid it in…

You’re smiling at fond memories, triggered by stuff you gradually shed along the way to growing up. Where are all these objects now?

Now imagine the loss a child who had to leave everything behind is feeling.

In a world of displacement and economic mobility, we regularly leave lifetimes of objects behind. In particular, children of expatriate parents, of migrants and immigrants, of the internally displaced, children of divorce, of the willfully or forcibly relocated, often find themselves in barren, unfamiliar places. While their family struggles to find a foothold, they are left with few transitional objects to comfort them. They are also spending more and more time online.

Like the child holding onto their blankie, teddy or doll, their “doudou” or “lovey”, to feel safe and secure, at night, in kindergarten, on the train… What if we could take all our favorite objects with us everywhere we go?

What if all our stuff can live digitally online, in portable safe spaces we can return to any time, to find comfort from the real world or the open metaverse?