Virtuals.IO Launches Eastworld Labs to Deploy Humanoids
Virtuals.IO has launched Eastworld Labs, an initiative focused on accelerating the real-world deployment of humanoid robots. The lab will emphasize rapid iteration between simulation, laboratory testing, and fieldwork in enterprise environments to bridge the gap from demonstration to commercial viability.
- Before pivoting to robotics, Virtuals.IO specialized in blockchain-based AI agents for the gaming and entertainment industries, creating an "agent-to-agent" marketplace on the Base network with a claimed "Agentic Gross Domestic Product" of over $470 million. - Eastworld Labs will launch with an initial fleet of over 30 full-sized humanoid robots, including the Unitree G1 platform, to provide startups and researchers with direct hardware access. - A core part of the lab's strategy involves an intermediate step of human-in-the-loop teleoperation, aiming to capture "wage arbitrage" in G7 economies while simultaneously collecting large-scale datasets for training fully autonomous agents. - The project is led by co-founders Jansen Teng (CEO) and Tiew Wee Kee, who founded Virtuals Protocol in 2021. - The initiative provides a full-stack platform that combines the physical robots with onchain funding and an "Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP)," a system designed for AI agents to autonomously transact with each other for services and tasks. - This venture places Virtuals.IO in a burgeoning humanoid robotics field alongside competitors like Figure AI, Tesla (Optimus), Boston Dynamics (Atlas), and Agility Robotics (Digit). - The long-term vision is to create a "hybrid society" of humans and AI agents, where spinning up a physical, robot-run business could be as simple as prompting a generative AI model.
