Futuristic Fight Club: VR-controlled boxing humanoid robots battle in San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- New virtual reality-controlled fighting humanoid robots faced off at a boxing gym in San Francisco Tuesday night.
It was a preview fight to a larger robot battle being held Friday night in the city.
The robots were going after it at Bay Breakers Boxing Gym on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco.
"Let's get wrecked! Let's go!" yelled Cix Liv, the CEO of the REK company who acted as the ring announcer.
Metal on metal, the fighting REK robots were controlled by players on a VR headset, in this case UFC fighter Hyder Amil and MMA fighter Jessica-Rose Clark.
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"This is like a different kind of fighting," ABC 7 News Reporter J.R. Stone said.
"Way different. I've never had a VR headset on before, let alone controlled a robot fighting another robot, it was sick," said Clark.
At one point, both robots, which were well-balanced on flat surfaces, came crashing down after they stepped on a random keyboard thrown in the ring.
"Jessy's went down first and then mine dramatically after," Amil said.
"Robots are obviously insanely hard to do and VR is insanely hard to do," Nima Zeighami of REK said. "If you get them both right, what you get is this ability to feel like you are the robot."
Each one of these robots weighs about 80 pounds and are four and a half feet tall, even shaking the floor of the ring a bit.
The REK company's dream is to have sponsored robot fighters competing around the world. Come Friday, the two REK robots will compete in their own sort of octagon at San Francisco's Temple nightclub. It's what is being billed as the "world's first VR-controlled humanoid fight."
"We're going to move towards ones basically the height and size of the adult male by the end of the year," said the CEO of REK Cix Liv. He continued, "I would say we're more likely to see a world like Robocop than Terminator just in the sheer economics and complexity of things."
So basically what you're seeing now is just the beginning.
