Are Humanoid Robots the Next Frontier for AI Agents?

Virtuals Protocol is launching Eastworld Labs, an AI accelerator focused on deploying humanoid robots and fostering a hybrid society of robots, virtual agents, and humans, leveraging a tele-operation model to gather data for future autonomous operations and integrate with its crypto-economic ecosystem.

• Eastworld Labs accelerates humanoid robot deployment, using tele-operation to gather data for autonomous AI.

• Founders can enter the accelerator via tokenization or direct seed funding, gaining access to robots, expertise, and research labs.

• The Virtuals token benefits from project pairings, trading taxes, and airdrops, powering a growing agentic and robotics ecosystem.

Virtuals Protocol, co-founded by Jansen Tang, is launching Eastworld Labs, an AI accelerator aimed at advancing humanoid robots and creating a hybrid society. The lab focuses on making it easier for founders to build humanoid use cases for consumers by providing funding, data, models, and distribution. Its initial strategy involves remote tele-operation of robots to solve labor shortages and collect critical real-world data, ultimately paving the way for fully autonomous robots and a new economic paradigm.

Eastworld Labs Launch

• 00:12:08 Virtuals Protocol is launching Eastworld Labs, an AI accelerator designed to foster the deployment of humanoid robots and establish a hybrid society of robots, virtual agents, and humans. The lab's core goal is to simplify the process for founders to develop humanoid consumer use cases by offering support in fundraising, data and model acquisition, and achieving market distribution. This initiative expands Virtuals' focus beyond digital agents to include physical AI, recognizing the significant unlock robotics provides.

Accelerator Mechanism

• 00:15:59 Eastworld Labs offers a unique residency program with two entry paths. The first path allows founders to launch a token for their robotics project, and if it crosses a $5 million market cap, they are offered a seat in the residency, which includes a free humanoid robot, access to technical staff, and collaborations with universities like CMU and Oxford. Alternatively, founders with strong teams and ideas who prefer not to tokenize can receive direct seed funding and incubation from Virtuals.

Tele-operation Strategy

• 00:19:24 Eastworld Labs is particularly interested in projects focused on remote tele-operation, envisioning a model where robots deployed in high-wage countries like the US or Australia are controlled by human operators in lower-wage countries such as Malaysia or the Philippines. This approach addresses labor shortages and offers significant cost savings (40-60%), with identified use cases including security guards, retail sales, plumbing, mechanics, and HVAC technicians. Tele-operation also serves as a crucial mechanism for generating vast amounts of real-world data to train future fully autonomous AI policies.

Robots & Societal Impact

• 00:29:32 The Maxspec Uni3 G1 humanoid robots, known for their dexterity, currently cost between $20,000 and $60,000, making initial adoption more likely in commercial sectors like retail and hospitality due to both cost savings and marketing benefits. Concerns about potential backlash from job displacement are acknowledged as an industry-wide AI issue, suggesting that governments will need to adapt. The vision is for robots to eventually become autonomous economic actors, with a future where everyday tasks are handled by agents or robots, shifting society from an economy of scarcity to one of abundance.

Data Collection & Training

• 00:38:50 Eastworld Labs collects data in two primary forms to train autonomous policies. Egocentric data is gathered from people wearing smart glasses or phones, capturing videos of their hands performing various tasks like cooking or folding clothes. Tele-operation data is collected during remote human control of robots, recording both visual information and detailed robot joint movements and applied forces. This aggregated data lake aims to become one of the largest robotics datasets, providing a valuable resource for resident teams to train their autonomous agents.

Crypto Integration & Tokenomics

• 00:41:12 Crypto plays a dual role in this ecosystem: first, as a tokenization layer for projects to raise capital and garner community attention through trading fees and token holder advocacy; second, as a blockchain-based coordination layer for machine-to-machine interactions via smart contracts. The Virtuals (VRT) token benefits from projects pairing with it in liquidity pools, driving up its value with ecosystem growth. Additionally, Virtuals collects 30 basis points of trading activity to fund ecosystem growth, and virtual token stakers receive 3-5% airdrops from new projects, emphasizing a network-state approach.