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Meet CarlBot: Your Newest Team Member

· 8 min read
Mike Heijmans
Mike Heijmans
CTO @ Rising Orchards / IgorBox

I want to tell you about the thing I've spent most of this year on, and I want to start by telling you what it isn't. Which is a weird way to start but with all the hate for AI in the creative space, which I understand and support, I want to explain why CarlBot is not and will NEVER be meant to replace the fun parts of designing and building attractions. It's here to help you do more of the fun part of dreaming, creating, and building your perfect attraction.

CarlBot isn't going to design your scare. It isn't going to tell you whether your puzzle is fair. It has no idea what your guests think is fun, or magical, or terrifying, and it NEVER WILL!. That's your job. It's always been your job, and honestly, it's the best part of the job.

What it will do is the other part. The dragging of clips. The connecting triggers to shows. The lining up of a talking prop to a voice track for the fourth time this week at eleven at night. Say hello to CarlBot, your technical assistant inside IgorBox Studio, and it's in public beta right now.

Why we built it​

Show building has two kinds of work in it. One kind is deciding what should happen: the timing, the misdirection, the exact half second before the wall moves. The other kind is getting that decision into the software. When I watch people build in IgorBox Studio, the first kind takes minutes and the second kind takes hours, and the hours are where the good ideas go to die. You have the scene in your head. You start laying it out. Forty minutes later you're fixing a control point and the scene has quietly gotten smaller because you're tired and frustrated. You cut out magic because the magic is just too time consuming to figure out.

I wanted a way to hand off the second kind of work without handing off the first. That's the whole design brief for CarlBot. You describe what should happen and when. CarlBot lays it out on the timeline, or drafts the Logic Rule, or writes the transcript. You look it over, fix what needs fixing, and approve it. You stay the person making the decisions. CarlBot handles the software side. It's like having an IgorBox Studio expert to implement your amazing idea so you can see it and tweak it to be perfect.

What it does today​

CarlBot reads your IgorBox Studio, not a generic one. It knows your controllers, your channel names, your shows, your media, and your rules. So when you talk to it, you're talking about your rig.

  • Timelines. "At 0:03 fire the air cannon for half a second, then strobe for two." It lays out the clips, fades, and color changes for you to check.
  • Logic Rules. Describe the puzzle in plain words, including what solved and failed mean, and CarlBot drafts the rule and connects the inputs, shows, and outputs.
  • Talking props. Give it a voice track and it can transcribe it, then uses the transcript and drives the jaw so it only moves on the words and stays shut between them. This one is my favorite. It's the thing in the trailer.
  • Questions. "Which shows use the fog machine?" "What's wired to the mat input?" "Why isn't the coffin firing?" It looks and tells you.

And the part I care most about: it asks before it does anything you might regret. Deleting something, replacing work that's already there, deploying to a controller, starting a show on real hardware. All of it stops and waits for you to click. Every change it makes is listed as it happens, it's recorded in your audit log as an AI change, and "undo your last change" is always one sentence away.

Here it is doing the talking-skull job. One request, and the jaw, rotate, nod, and eye tracks are laid out from the voice track, ready for me to check and edit to make it perfect.

Where to find it​

Open IgorBox Studio and look for the CarlBot button in the bottom-right corner. It's on for every IgorBox Studio on the Free, Builder, and Pro plans today. Enterprise customers, your allowance is part of your contract, so talk to us.

CarlBot runs on credits. A credit is a penny, and every plan includes a monthly allowance: 300 on Free, 1,000 on Builder, 2,000 on Pro. A typical question costs somewhere between ten and thirty. If you run out, CarlBot just pauses until the first of the month, or until you add more. Nobody gets surprised on an invoice. Credit plans and packs are on the billing page, and they're discounted during the beta. All the details are on the Credits & Plans page.

If you're on Pro or Enterprise, there's one more thing. What CarlBot can do can be handed to your own AI assistant. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or whatever you already use, and it can work in your IgorBox Studio from wherever you are. Setup is on the Connect Your Own AI Assistant page.

A few things that help​

CarlBot is only as good as what your IgorBox Studio tells it. Three habits pay for themselves fast:

  1. Name your channels. "Skull Jaw," not "PWM 3." CarlBot works by the names you give things.
  2. Write real descriptions. A show description that says what the scene is for, what it should feel like, and how it should end changes how CarlBot approaches everything in that show.
  3. Transcribe your audio. Words and sound events turn a waveform into a map. It's the difference between a prop that talks and a prop that flaps, and it makes "flash the wash on the thunder" just work.

There's a whole page of these on Tips and Tricks, and a new Prop Rig section on every controller where you can tell IgorBox Studio how each prop physically moves, so animated motion stays safe and lands on cue.

It's a beta, and I mean that​

CarlBot works in real IgorBox Studios today. A handful of haunts and escape rooms have been building with it for a while, and their feedback is the reason it's as good as it is. It is also actively under construction. New abilities show up often. Some things will change. And sometimes it will get something wrong, which is why every risky action asks first and why I'd tell you to review its work before you deploy, the same way you'd check anyone's work before it goes in front of guests.

Every answer has a thumbs up and a thumbs down. Use them. A thumbs down goes straight to me with your note. If you'd rather talk to a person, I'm on Discord and at help@igorbox.com, same as always. And if you'd rather not have CarlBot in your IgorBox Studio at all, an owner or admin can turn it off in settings. No hard feelings.

It's still your show​

I know how this industry feels about AI, because I feel it too. Nobody got into haunts or escape rooms to have a machine make their creative decisions, and nobody should. So I'll say it plainly: CarlBot has no taste. It can't judge a scare, it can't feel a room, and it has never met a single one of your guests. Everything that makes your attraction yours is still yours.

What it can do is give you back the hours. Spend them on the parts that you enjoy doing. This is what AI should be, something to remove the stuff we don't like doing so we get more time to do the stuff we do like doing.

Go make something amazing. ✨