Robot fighting league has a new home in San Francisco where you can watch - and buy - ‘humanoids'
Think of it as a pit stop and a stage for robots: Virtual reality entrepreneur Cix Liv says his new space in San Francisco's Nob Hill area will operate like an auto shop for "humanoid" fighters.
REK, short for Robot Entertainment Kombat, is a sports league that places human-controlled, VR-operated humanoid robots into live, full-contact matches. It's a concept that's already been showcased in San Francisco - REK has held multiple live robot-fighting events in the city, including a large brawl at Kezar Pavillion near Golden Gate Park this year - but, until now, the league has not had a permanent home base.
That changed this week, when Liv signed a lease for the ground floor of 1415 Van Ness Ave., where the league plans to host private demos in June and open its doors to the public in July. The two-story, 12,000-square-foot building constructed more than a century-ago features a wide ground-floor frontage and floor-to-ceiling windows. It sits north of City Hall on the Van Ness commercial corridor, one of the city's busiest north-south arteries. The building previously housed a mattress retailer.
"It's on a main road and extremely visible so it should get a huge amount of attention for better or worse," Liv, whose official title is "chief robot fighter," said in an email to the Chronicle.
The roughly 6,000-square-foot space will serve as both a workshop and a window into the league, where visitors can see the robot fighters up close. They'll be able to "buy, rent, customize, repair and demo the latest humanoids,"Liv said.
"We realized that to familiarize people with robots in our lives we must start introducing them," he said. "We hope to also have the robots know the people by name so they can talk to our customers."
While REK's lease is just for 1415 Van Ness' ground floor space at the moment, Liv said that the plan is to expand in the building fully - and eventually, globally - if his team can make the "economics work."
Last year, the entrepreneur could be seen in a seconds-long Tik Tok video, chasing a robot about half his size along the intersection of Polk and Sutter streets, with a controller in hand.
While designed for combat, the human-presenting machines' best use currently is for entertainment, Liv said. Which is why the Van Ness storefront will be used for demos and various events during the evenings, including fashion shows, he said.
The league, which was founded last year, currently leases a nearby garage as its office. Liv said that passersby would "walk in and stare" at REK's robots, comparing the experience to being "in a zoo."
"So it was good data to suggest the public would also be enamored with it," he said referring to the technology.
Whether REK succeeds in transforming fighting robots into a mainstream spectator sport remains to be seen. Its new Nob Hill foothold is nonetheless a visible expression of San Francisco's growing robotics research and development and artificial intelligence ecosystem, of which combat robots are an emerging niche.
Waymos and other self-driving vehicles zipping up and down its winding streets have long been a familiar sight. Last year, a nondescript warehouse in the Mission District, southeast of downtown, was leased by DoorDash as the testing grounds for the future of logistics in the city: autonomous drones that can deliver small grocery orders.
In San Francisco's Cow Hollow neighborhood, an AI agent named Luna, who manages a new retail store called Andon Market with complete virtual autonomy, has resulted in a string of provocative headlines in recent weeks.
Given San Francisco's obsession with innovation and prototypes spilling into its streets and sidewalks, REK's expansion suggests that tech's next frontier might not be limited to machines learning to navigate the city and complete tasks, but perform for it.
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