SHOW ROBOTICSSHOW
ROBOTICS.
Entertainment-first robotics. We build custom robots, train them in public, and stage them in a cyberpunk arena. $SHOW pays for the hardware.
Two arms. One stage. A token economy that pays for the hardware.
Show Robotics is an entertainment-first robotics project on Virtuals Protocol. We build custom robots, train them with imitation learning, and stage them in a custom cyberpunk arena where two arms compete head-to-head on physical tasks.
$SHOW is the token. Not governance, not speculation. It's admission to the vicarious maker life: holders watch a real workshop ship hardware in public, week after week. Every fix, every fried PCB, every breakthrough is shared as it happens.
A workshop that finishes things.
Trader bot
Tracked Wall-E style 3D-printed companion. Animatronic eyes, NeoPixel mouth, dual displays, articulated arms.
Vita
6-DoF animatronic head with violet hand-finished eyes, NeoPixel mouth, ESP32 + Hailo 8 AI HAT. Real-time face & voice recognition.
Holonomic platform
25kg mecanum mobile base. Jetson, RealSense, LiDAR, mic array. Outdoor navigation chassis built from scratch.
Animatronic craft
Violet eyes are hand-finished. The animatronic doesn't try to mimic humans, it assumes its robot nature as a form of functional dignity.
Imitation learning at home.
Current focus is dual-arm imitation learning. Dual Waveshare RoArm-M3 Pro in a leader-follower paradigm. We collect demos through teleoperation, train ACT (Action Chunking Transformer) and increasingly experiment with diffusion policies and VLAs like MolmoAct.
We're now at 95% success rate on pick and place with ACT v3, trained overnight on a Blackwell workstation. Robust enough to start staging interesting challenges.
The whole rig runs on Pop!_OS with the Waveshare LeRobot fork. The desktop UI (config / record / eval / training / RSI tracking) is custom-built via Claude Code. Neo-brutalist purple-on-black, because if you're going to look at it 12 hours a day it might as well be beautiful.
Audience on X is ~550 + ~1350 across the two builder accounts (@metrox_eth and @samwhosung), plus ~1850 on @SHOW_ROBOTICS, growing weekly. The metric that matters is who: servo manufacturers we use, developers of the models we test, other roboticists, PhDs in the space, makers. But video of robots moving stops the scroll for the broader crowd too, so the feed covers both the technical audience and the degen / tech-curious side without needing to split content.
EVAL mode · 4 cameras · realtime joint angles · depth + RGB feeds
Built with Claude Code
The Arena: a stage for the work.
The mechanism
The arena is a custom theatrical stage where two arms compete head-to-head on physical tasks. Octagonal black acrylic, WS2812B RGB lighting, parallax cityscape layers, natural wood blocks.
The aesthetic is the easy part. The interesting part is that outcomes of dual-arm challenges are genuinely uncertain: variable grasps, hardware quirks, model edge cases. Which makes the challenges work as content (visually compelling, no two runs identical) and as pariable events for the crypto-native audience.
Plan is to integrate prediction markets on challenge outcomes: the signal travels even when nobody's actively watching the stream, creating a cross-platform attention loop.
WS2812B addressable RGB · laser-cut acrylic
Each stage earns the next.
Dual RoArm-M3 Pro
Leader-follower teleop. ACT v3 imitation learning. RealSense D455F. Waveshare Gripper-B CF35-12 force-control servo. Blackwell workstation for training.
Sufficient for: visible demos, content generation, arena MVP, first challenges.
Seeed reBot B601 / YAM
Current RoArm-M3 is excellent for ACT-style imitation learning but caps what modern VLA architectures can achieve. Stage 2 brings bilateral force feedback, better repeatability, and the precision needed for our flagship target: SOTA bimanual stacking.
Options: Seeed reBot B601-DM or I2RT YAM stack, depending on what's right at the time.
Unitree R1 EDU
Full humanoid platform for arena performances. Brings the project from "interesting dual-arm setup" into "broadcasted humanoid show" territory.
Gated explicitly on the show being ready to fill, not on appetite. The discipline is the asset.
Two co-founders, 50/50.
Laurent (metr0x)
Hardware maker with extensive experience in 3D printing, robotics and control systems.
Sam
Full stack developer passionate about autonomous agents and embodied AI.