[Multiple forms of presence are involved in a new, real-life version of the 2011 film Real Steal, with human players in virtual reality (and with the help of AI) controlling humanoid robots fighting each other in a boxing ring. One person involved in creating the events says this in the news report below from KGO in San Francisco: “Robots are obviously insanely hard to do and VR is insanely hard to do… If you get them both right, what you get is this ability to feel like you are the robot.” Coverage in Unilad Tech concludes with this assessment: “It might not necessarily catch on in baseball or football, but [CEO Cix) Liv could be on to something in the combat sports world — especially when blending it with virtual reality technology that maintains the human element in some capacity.” More details are in the story from Futurism that follows below. See the original KGO story for the 2:16 minute video version and a second related video, and also a 15:14 minute video from Core Memory on YouTube that elaborates on a Core Memory story (which is behind a paywall at this writing). –Matthew]

[Image: Source: Futurism]

Futuristic Fight Club: VR-controlled boxing humanoid robots battle in San Francisco

By J.R. Stone
September 24, 2025

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.

“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.

—

[From Futurism]

Humanoid Robots Are Beating Each Other to Pulp in an Underground Fight Club

“Once people can really feel this and see this, it’ll be fully mainstream.”

By Noor Al-Sibai
August 13, 2025

In a tucked-away San Francisco warehouse, four humanoid robots hang out — quite literally, from standalone frames — as they wait for their flesh-and-blood overlords to train them to kill.

As reporter and writer Ashlee Vance writes on his Substack Core Memory, this entirely robotic fight club is known as REK, and is operated by virtual reality entrepreneur and fighting robot enthusiast Cix Liv.

With one big robot battle win under his belt from San Francisco’s Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) league, Liv has already begun taking cues from mixed martial arts, pro wrestling, anime, and science fiction to create something that is part sport and part theater.

Using his decade-long background in VR, Liv envisions REK as a place where human “pilots” donning headsets and arm-worn “combat controllers” as they enter the virtual fighting ring. These pilots activate the movements of robots remotely that will hit, punch, slap, and even cut each other up with swords.

Though he’s got the VR bona fides, Liv still has a lot of work to do. As he told Vance, REK has already begun training artificial intelligence models on videos of fighting moves that will, hopefully, convert into actual choreography for the robots in the ring.

“This is going to be the next [Ultimate Fighting Championship],” Liv told Vance. “When [my robot is] walking around and he has full swords, you can feel the pounding in the ground. You know deep in your soul that this thing could kill you. It’s like when you see a lion or something and the hairs go up on the back of your neck.”

“Once people can really feel this and see this,” he continued, “it’ll be fully mainstream.”

Unfortunately, those lofty ambitions may not be quite ready for fruition.

Last month, the self-proclaimed “chief robot fighter” posted an eyebrow-raising video on X showing his “humanoid robot boyDeREK” trashing around violently.

Eventually, DeREK’s frenetic freak-out became so intense, it caused the crane the robot was hanging from to plummet — and apparently, for part of its head to fly upwards once it hit the ground.

As Liv told Vance, the robot’s tantrum seemed to be caused by something almost human: the feeling of one’s feet not touching the ground, resulting in, well, a bunch of thrashing.

Because it could not “depend on its usual stability mechanisms,” as Vance put it, DeREK did the next best thing: it flailed around until it fell over, causing Liv and Amanda Watson, REK’s chief technology officer, whose voice was heard off-camera in the video, to back away from the out-of-control bot.

“Poor [DeREK] just wants to be free,” Watson joked of the robot, who, per her own headcanon, is more of a lover than a fighter.

Though REK is far from the first company looking to build fighting robots — that distinction generally is conferred upon BattleBots, the late-1990s show and competition where robotics nerds got to show off their skills in building dangerous fighting machines — this bot-based fight club boasts passion and comparative humility that set it apart from the otherwise sterile world of humanoids we find ourselves in today.

“I’d made some money from a prior start-up and was deciding whether to get a mortgage on a house or have robots,” Liv told Vance. “I chose to do this instead of having a house.”