OpenClaw in Your Hand: Building a Physical AI Terminal - Lech Kalinowski, Callstack

Dr. Lech Kalinowski presents Vault, a unique AI-native handheld terminal built on an ESP32-S3, featuring a dual-display (OLED for live interaction, e-paper for static content) and powered by a single battery. It operates in four modes—shell, assist, control, and an LLM-native RPG—and controls autonomous OpenClaw agents against a local, self-hosted 120B parameter GPT model served by NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM. The talk delves into the AI-native architecture, why inference remains on the backend, real-time agent thinking surfacing on e-paper, engineering challenges, and LLM-native game design, highlighting the potential for calm, text-first AI interaction.