Imagine you’re at a hockey game, it’s approaching a break between periods. You decide you need to pee, get a drink, and likely a hot dog. But you don’t want to miss anything. You remember the new feature in the arena’s app that lets you enter what you want to do, where you are, and tells you the best way to do that based on historical trends and current lines and inventory. We’re going to make that happen with Viam.
Viam has just announced that we are partnering with UBS Arena, the New York Islanders and Oak View Group to be the “Official AI Technology Partner of UBS Arena.” This is an incredible opportunity to show how Viam’s flexibility and versatility can impact people in the physical world. Can they have more fun? Can they be safer? Can they create less of a burden on the environment at scale? And can the business who is providing these experiences become more efficient, more profitable, and more sustainable?
We’re going to be providing technology solutions for a number of really interesting use cases including AI-optimized line management for things like bathrooms and concessions, as well as a number of other projects around parking and other challenges that we are going to be working with UBS Arena to deliver and announce over the next months and throughout the Islanders’ season.
Addressing shared frustrations in the real world
As an engineer I have always gravitated to solving problems that are frustrating and difficult for a lot of people. Early in my career I found over and over again that in building some kind of application we would repeatedly get stuck at the database, and I knew I wasn’t alone in that. That is what led me to creating MongoDB, but databases in the end are still for the most part a ‘digital world’ problem.
While I was happy making life less frustrating and difficult for developers, I really wanted to find something to work on that would make life less frustrating and difficult for everyone; not just software engineers, but anybody just living their life and doing their job ‘in the real world’ as it were.
The challenge of software for physical devices
So when I left MongoDB I started looking for useful machines I could write software for, robotic arms, and sprinkler systems, cat feeders, and cameras, but there was a huge problem. It was immediately clear that programming software for physical machines was seriously jammed up with every kind integration and scaling problem you can imagine.
I wanted it to be easy to dive in and get a physical device to work more efficiently and intelligently, but it just wasn’t. I looked around, thinking that someone must have a complete solution to this issue. It didn’t exist. So I started making Viam to solve that problem, because just as with databases I knew if it was frustrating me, it would be frustrating literally everyone trying to do something similar. The UBS Arena partnership is an amazing showcase to highlight Viam’s versatility.
Innovative use cases, better fan experiences
With this partnership with UBS Arena and Islanders, I’m expecting that the work we’ve put into Viam will start paying off in a big way to make every day people’s lives better. Millions and millions of people gather in arenas literally every night, so if we can solve some hard problems for UBS Arena, integrating sensors, cameras, and other physical machines that are critical to the facility and to the fan experience, the impact in the ‘real world’ will be enormous.
I’ve been amazed that over the last week, when I have described the app we are going to make that will help you find the shortest bathroom line, and get your food faster at UBS Arena, literally every person I mentioned it to has immediately asked me when they could have it in whatever sports arena they happened to frequent. The appetite for the kinds of solutions that Viam enables is truly palpable, and it’s fair to say that long bathroom lines are the very definition of an ‘urgent’ real-world problem. I’m excited to see what we can do to help.
When I dreamed of finding a way to program physical devices to help solve problems in the real world, this is exactly the kind of ubiquitous, human, ‘real world’ problem I was hoping that Viam could address. I can’t wait to dive into the partnership with UBS Arena, the Islanders and OVG to explore any number of ways that Viam can make the experience in UBS Arena better for everyone.
