REK Wants To Let VR Headset Wearers Pilot Real Fighting Robots

According to its founder, REK will be a VR robot fighting game where the top players are flown out to pilot humanoid robots in fights at physical events.

REK comes from XR entrepreneur Cix Liv, who previously cofounded the VR livestreaming tool LIV and the VR fitness tracker YUR. Cix had previously envisioned REK as a mixed reality fighting game in 2022, but canceled that idea in 2023 citing low audience interest as well as the technical and practical issues inherent in using headsets outdoors.

Cix says the virtual robots in the REK VR game, which will "likely" be free to play, will have the same movement mechanics as the real robots, such that players can directly transfer their skills to the real fights.

The top players of the VR game will be flown out to a physical location to pilot robots at the physical fights, using a tethered PC VR headset connected to a PC on the same local network as the robots, to minimize latency.

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Last year, Cix said he was making a fitness-focused smart glove, and eventually a fitness-focused headset, under the brand Vi, but this is no longer happening. Cix tells UploadVR that he couldn't raise enough money, though still hopes to make his own headset "at some point" to control the REK robots.

Cix is also an outspoken critic of Meta, ostensibly driven by the company not supporting background services on Quest, a capability he needed to bring his YUR fitness tracker to the platform. Cix has also repeatedly claimed that Meta stole his YUR idea with the introduction of Oculus Move, the fitness tracking feature which Meta ironically discontinued last month.

Cix's criticism of Meta has verged into the realm of misinformation, though. In November he publicly claimed that Meta was set to conduct major layoffs in the VR section of its Reality Labs division in Q1 2025, and that Meta was outsourcing Quest headset design to China, with the hardware team "gone". Q1 has now passed, and these claimed layoffs did not happen, while Meta's CTO publicly and directly denied the claims of outsourcing headset design.

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REK plans to launch the VR game this year, and conduct the first physical robot fights later this year too.