Content creation, system design and integration specialists Vivid Studio has helped Woohoo, a new AI-themed restaurant located in Downtown Dubai, to utilise artificial intelligence, interactive visuals, audio and creative storytelling to “transform the dining experience”.
Led by the AI-powered culinary mind of Chef Aiman, Woohoo is built around the concept of humans and AI working together in harmony. Chef Aiman creates the menu, which is prepared by highly-trained chefs and delivered by waiting staff to lucky guests who dine in an AI-inspired environment, surrounded by visual content that is masterminded by AI.
Woohoo encompasses lighting elements, large-scale LED visuals and spatial audio, all controlled by AI. The AV system comprises eight media servers that play a series of custom content, large LED screens throughout the restaurant, lighting elements and a network of 46 loudspeakers, which use TiMax spatial audio processing and leverage SP Grid – Stage Precision’s scalable low-code platform for agnostic technology integration, data management, and systems automation & control – to create an immersive audio experience.
“The owner of the restaurant and the owner of Vivid Studio collaborated on this idea of an AI chef and restaurant and played around with ideas of how the concept might work,” explained Yuri Stranyov, lead engineer at Vivid Studio. “We had already been using SP, and more recently SP Grid, in our own virtual production studio, so when it came to thinking about the ‘brain’ that would be in the middle of all the lighting, audio and video, I knew SP Grid was the best data management solution available.”
“The restaurant’s AI agent does the set-up for the day, choosing the order and timing of the different visual and audio elements, which we refer to as ‘parallel universes’,” continued Stranyov. “Together with the Stage Precision team, we wrote a custom Grid Extension with SP Grid’s Python-scripting features to connect the AI-agent to the AVLM workflow, allowing it to manage the day-to-day running of the restaurant system.”
The AI agent ensures a ‘uniqueness’ to the order of the day’s content, and even creates its own AI-generated content, whilst the restaurant is closed overnight. This content is then reviewed by the team before being included in the library of visuals and audio that the AI agent can select from. Whilst AI might be running the systems, it was down to the Vivid Studio team to build the robust server system and marry together hardware and software. SP Grid was the canvas on which this incredible system was built.
From the beginning ideation and experimentation phase, Stranyov built everything within SP Grid. “The whole logic was created in Grid Studio initially, where we built the workflows and set up state machine calendars,” he explained. “It is convenient, and the user experience for me setting it up is very much based on human logic. You connect things together, and it works. If it doesn’t work, it’s easy to change things, and if you need to make something work together, programming is much easier than you would expect.”
