South Korean robotics company Lounge Lab announced today that it has opened Brown Bana, a robot-powered ice cream store in Seoul.
Technically, Brown Bana is more of a co-botic setup, as the articulating robot arms just move cups and capsule-based ice cream around while a human adds the toppings (see the video below) and serves the finished product. But based on the information Lounge Labs sent to The Spoon, the robots are equal parts labor and entertainment.
From Lounge Labs’ press announcement:
Brown Bana’s ice cream robot Aris provides an interactive experience in which customers and robots communicate through emotional motion functions and animated characters that express various emotions with faces. A total of seven motion contents, including ‘greeting,’ ‘calling,’ ‘rest,’ ‘drowsy,’ and various dance movements, are applied, as well as facial expressions suitable for each motion through a mounted display with character animation.
Theatricality is certainly part of a food robot’s appeal, especially since the technology is still novel for most audiences. Watching a robot make you food is still enticing enough to make passers-by stop and watch. Cafe X added waving and other gestures to its articulating robotic barista arms, and even set up its see-through kiosk on a busy downtown San Francisco street corner (though, those locations later shut down).
Lounge Labs believes Brown Bana’s robot hook will be appealing to both millennials and gen z customers, and is targeting cafes, amusement parks and pop-up spaces as target installation locations.
Brown Bana is just one of the automated experiences that Lounge Labs has developed. The company also makes the LOUNGE’X robot barista that makes pourover coffee, as well as the MooinSangHoei AI-powered vending machine.
