Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks)
Physical AI is built in pieces: perception, mapping, simulation, policies, hardware. Every lab and startup holds one or two. Nobody holds them all.
This night puts many of the pieces in one room. Live demos of robots, real-world foundation models, and simulation show what works right now. Then the people who ran them sit down for a panel about the rest: failure modes, sim-to-real gaps, the data that doesn't exist yet, and what happens where the pieces meet.
The demos
Live demos from across the physical AI stack, from robots to real-world foundation models to simulation, each showing real work right now. Each demo ends with a plain-English breakdown: how it works, and where its limits are. Full lineup announced soon.
The panel
The demoers stay on stage with audience Q&A. You don't need a robotics background to follow the demos, and the conversation goes deep enough for people who build this for a living.
5:00 PM: Doors
6:00 PM: Demos, panel, Q&A
8:00 PM: Close, with open time around the demos after the program
The Forest at Niantic Spatial, inside the Ferry Building, San Francisco.
Getting in
Niantic Spatial is inside the Ferry Building, which runs its own security, so attendees must be on the approved guest list. Register with your full name as it appears on your photo ID, and bring that ID. Arrive between 5:00 and 5:30: Niantic staff will meet you at the bottom of the grand staircase and bring you up to Suite 200. The program ends at 8:00.
Registration
The room holds about 75, so registration is approved by hand. Please share a sentence about what you're building or why you're curious during registration. The full program is recorded and published on Rally SF's YouTube channel.
Hosted by Rally SF with Niantic Spatial. #physicalAI #RallySF
Scaniverse is Niantic Spatial’s front door to physical AI: it turns real-world capture into a geometrically accurate world model that can train robots in simulation and help them localize and understand the same environment in the real world.
Niantic Spatial is building the real-world model for physical AI, giving robots, AI agents, and people an accurate, shared understanding of physical spaces. Its reconstruction technology captures environments with geometric accuracy and fine detail from any standard camera, and its Visual Positioning System delivers precise positioning almost anywhere in the world. Learn more at nianticspatial.com
Rally SF is a community for AI-first builders and operators in San Francisco.
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