Viam Demo Showcase

‍Vino

“The Wine Cart” or “The Wine Pouring Demo”, now affectionately referred to as “Vino” was initially created in the Viam lab in early 2025. It debuted publicly at the UBSA Arena in the spring of 2025, and Congresswoman Laua Gillen was so taken with it she immediately invited Viam to share the demo at the US Capitol Building. Due to regulations around not serving alcohol to Capitol interns, the Demo in DC became a ‘water pouring’ demonstration. We prefer to serve wine, and it is now a common feature of public events here at Viam. 

Trivia: it was seeing this wine pouring demo in the lab that induced the Viking CEO to ask “whether Viam could make a robot sand a boat?, leading directly to our groundbreaking work with Surface AI at the Viking Factory.

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Chessbot

The Chess playing robot has an important history in the Viam roadmap. CEO and Founder Eliot Horowitz first conceived of the Viam platform after trying for several months to program a robotic arm to play chess, with limited success. Realizing that the entire approach to programming physical devices needed a holistic, modern re-boot he founded Viam and began work on the platform we have today. In December of 2025, with the platform built and ready for wider adoption the team challenged Eliot to prove that the platform accelerates robotics development, as intended, by programming a robot arm to play Chess in less than 24 hours. He had the robot playing chess with itself in approximately 10 hours. 

The demo today has benefited from a number of rounds of Build on Viam hackathon days, and the team will continue to add features to make this the best autonomous physical Chess playing machine in the World. 

Trivia: The Chess engine on the robot is Stockfish; if you want you can adjust the settings to give yourself a fighting chance to beat the robot.

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Tele-op

This Demo was developed in early 2026 as a precursor to a project involving Viam and VLAs, as tele-op is commonly used to ‘train’ robots in VLA technologies. That is not the only industrial use for tele-op however; tele-op is commonly seen in industrial settings as a useful new safety protocol allowing a person-in-the-loop in cases where a robotic process is not operating as intended and some intervention might be needed. The roadmap for this demo includes investigating a number of different technologies for the operator to manipulate the arms and grippers including motion sensing gloves, and even something as simple as a common mobile phone.

Trivia: the teleop demo was so compelling to one partner that on the first day visiting Viam he immediately asked if the team could join his booth at the Hannover Messe industrial automation conference a few weeks later.