E496 – The Starting Square

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Photo by Benjamin Bousquet on Unsplash

Andy and Michael R are checking out the upcoming FOSDEM 2025 conference (Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting). This got them thinking about Episode 494 – License to Brick, where they talked about how the makers of the Moxie emotional support toy for kids were shutting down. But guess what? The CEO decided to let a team of developers create an Open Source version of the server and make it available for everyone!

After both of our hosts find the same Toot on Mastodon, about how a town in Poland is using Clams to monitor their water supply. While the story is not new, there is a very interesting documentary available for free on Youtube. This discussion takes us into the world of home automation and brilliant example – Operation Toilet!

A quick pivot takes us to a tool that has been created to allow Open Street Map data to generate MineCraft worlds. Perhaps this new world could be used to test out the new VR glasses that scientists have created for mice. Andy and Michael spend time enjoying the sentences in the article, as it appears that there may be a whole industry of “standard mouse VR”. Is this really common? Really?

We wrap up the show with a few preannouncements from LG for the upcoming CES. It appears that they will continue to add more and more screens in the house. We are sure the main use case is for new ads. We can’t wait to see what else is announced as CES.

Show Links

Moxie works on open sourcing their servers – https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/30/embodied-is-actually-trying-to-release-moxie-robots-to-the-open-source-community/ 

Poland city uses 8 clams to secure their water supply – https://hear-me.social/@tylerknowsnothing/113743591435484939

Generate MineCraft Replicas based on Open Street Map – https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/minecraft-tool-lets-you-create-scale-replicas-of-real-world-locations-arnis-uses-geospatial-data-from-openstreetmap-to-generate-minecraft-maps 

VR Goggles for Mice – https://gizmodo.com/scientists-built-tiny-vr-goggles-for-mice-2000543775 

LG Announces microwave with 27 inch screen – https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/30/24331994/lg-microwave-27-inch-display-speakers 

LG Announces new monitors for gaming – https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/29/24331748/lg-ultragear-gx9-bendable-oled-5k2k-monitors-specs 

Our friend Roo’s Connected Fridge Tumblr – https://www.tumblr.com/fuckyeahinternetfridge 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:07 — 47.5MB) | Embed

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e495 — Personal Planetarium

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Inscription on the sundial at the Morehead Planetarium reading “When it is noon in Chapel Hill, it is 12:00 noon New York, 11:00am Chicago, 10:00am Denver, 9:00am San Francisco, 7:00am Honolulu, 6:00pm Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna, Rome, 5:00pm Dublin, London, Lisbon, 2:00pm Rio de Janeiro, 8:00pm Moscow, 10:30pm Calcutta, next day 2:00am Tokyo, 1:00am Hong Kong”
Photo by Michael Martine, Morehead Planetarium Sundial, Chapel Hill Sept 2019

Published 30 December 2024

e494 with Michael and Michael on personal planetariums, digital doppelgängers, agentic AI acceleration, and a whole lot more!

Michael and Michael start this episode off with a full dome sized bang, Sandwich Vision’s Theater app.  In addition to replicating famous theater spaces via Apple Vision Pro, Theater 2.0 also introduces a planetarium experience.  Michael R makes a North Carolina tie to the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill.  Michael M is reminded how the planetarium VR experience has surfaced on the podcast before.  See the link in the show notes to e177 from 2017 for one such example.

The team calls back to last week’s episode, dealing with AI discovering the rules to games thousands of years old with a new story from Nature.  This article explores the use of AI in translating animal communications from birds, whales, elephants and more, as well as identifying unique animals.  Additional use case for AI and GenAI include Apple’s Image Wand in iOS & iPadOS 18.2, a physics engine called Genesis, and creating a meeting doppelgänger via HeyGen.  The idea of sending an agentic version of yourself to a meeting sparks a lively discussion about responsible AI and what this bodes for the differentiation that the human may bring.  The trustworthiness (truthiness?) of chatbot responses surfaces via a pair of stories where people say “I asked ChatGPT …” or how the chatbot itself tends to follow mechanics similar to how mentalists interact with their audience.   

Wrapping things up for the episode, Michael and Michael anticipate the upcoming CES with a couple of hardware stories: a supremely expensive transparent television and a MagSafe gaming controller.

If you could talk with the animals, what would you say?  What new consumer electronics do you hope to see from CES 2025?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

A VRy Personal Planetarium

9 to 5 Mac article: Apple Vision Pro just got a planetarium, and it’s friggin’ awesome

Sandwich Vision‘s Theater: Cinema & Events app for Apple Vision Pro

IMAX app for iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro

Reef Distribution 

Morehead Planetarium and Science Center

Games at Work e177: What could possibly go wrong?

Adler Planetarium

AI

Nature article: AI decodes the calls of the wild

IMDb: Dr. Dolittle, 1967

CNet article: Conjure Drawings From Sketches Using Image Wand in Apple Intelligence on Your iPhone or iPad

GitHub: Genesis: A Generative and Universal Physics Engine for Robotics and Beyond

Globe and Mail article: I created an AI avatar of myself to go to Zoom meetings

HeyGen

The Verge article: Here’s a new way to lose an argument online: the appeal to AI

SoftwareCrisis.dev article: The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

National Geographic article: How technology is reshaping religion

Marie Kondo – KonMari

Browsing the past, and the future (CES 2025)

Tom’s Hardware article: Relive surfing the original internet with new emulator — 34 years later, WorldWideWeb app commemorates the first web browser

LG product page: 77 Inch Class LG SIGNATURE OLED T: World’s first Transparent 4K Smart TV 2024 with True Wireless Video & Audio Transfer

NotebookCheck article: M-Con: New MagSafe gaming controller for smartphones revealed before CES 2025 with Hall effect joysticks and pocketable design

Wikipedia article: Danger Hiptop

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:08 — 59.8MB) | Embed

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e494 — License to Brick

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North Carolina First in Flight automobile license plate reading BRICKED
North Carolina custom automobile license plate “BRICKED”

Published 23 December 2024

e493 with Michael, Michael and Andy on digital storage for a century, AI datasets, videos & new Oreo flavors, hacking digital license plates and robots, and a whole lot more!

Andy, Michael and Michael start this episode off with a detailed article from the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab detailing the challenges and complexities of storing and retrieving digital data for a hundred years.  Sticking with the same institution of higher education (and the same Law Library), the next discussion deals with a dataset of one million public domain books to give the general public “highly-refined and curated content” to build AI models per the Wired article.  Next up are discussions on the use of AI in generating video content and new Oreo recipes.

Then, the co-hosts turn to an article on hacking the Reviver digital license plates in use in California and Arizona.  The team predicted that this may happen in 2018 in episode 200, in a very ‘back to the future’ moment.  

Hardware supported by cloud services and data are always susceptible to those services continuing to be available.  When the companies supporting the data and services close down, the hardware is bricked.  A story for this week about emotional support robots for children becoming bricks reminds the co-hosts of the Gatebox anime-style holographic AI from episodes 159 and 218.

Wrapping things up for the episode, before they are ‘OUTATIME”, the co-hosts discuss how AI can be used to recreate the rules from thousand year old games and congratulate the newest chess world champion.

What data would you want to store for more than a century?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

Data Storage

Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab Century-Scale Storage

The Long Now Foundation

National Park Service History of Muir Woods

Wikipedia article: Disk pack

AI

Wired article: Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft

Institutional Data Initiative at Harvard Law School Library

MIT Technology Review article: This is where the data to build AI comes from

Ars Technica article: A new, uncensored AI video model may spark a new AI hobbyist movement

Gizmodo article: Oreo Maker Says It’s Using AI to Create New Snacks

Hackin’ like 007

Wired article: Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets

Reviver

Games at Work e200: Eye in the Sky

Gizmodo article: This Playdate Mod Turns the Handheld Into the Cutest Little Robot Ever

Techdirt article: Startups Implosion Will Render $800 Emotional Support Robots For Children Into Useless Bricks

Games at Work e218: Virtually Married

Games at Work e444: Glitch in the Matrix

Thousand Year Checkmate

New Scientist article: The ancient board games we finally know how to play – thanks to AI

David Allen Green blog post: “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” – the story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending

Music Genome Project

GameTable article: Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Heritage

chess.com article: 18-Year-Old Gukesh Becomes Youngest-Ever Undisputed Chess World Champion

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:11 — 47.6MB) | Embed

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e493 — A VR Merry Holiday

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festive lights
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Published 16 December 2024

e493 with Andy, Michael & Michael — all things VR, from & Project to to the crossovers with the and a whole lot more!

Andy, Michael and Michael are back together again, and have a whole episode full of VR, AR, MR and XR stories to discuss!  The team starts things off with the mixed reality partnership between Samsung and Google.  Dubbed “Project Moohan”, stemming from the Korean word for infinity, the cohosts consider a couple of articles on this MR exploration.  According to the YouTube video, these corporations are considering the seamless movement from a headset (VR) to glasses (AR) as part of the overarching operating system powering each.  The video gives an intriguing example of what the user experience may be to watch a baseball game, complete with statistics, news, ball trajectory and much more.  The viewing and fan participation in such mixed reality experiences lend themselves to rich engagement.  

Michael R marvels at the recently released UltraWide mode for the Apple Vision Pro, granting an amazing worskpace vista to users.  Andy shares the Espresso display concept of laptop users having a second screen that they can take with them on the go.

Then things take a weird turn.  An article about Gorilla Tag prompts Michael M to check out the embedded video to better understand what this game is all about.  The recording of an older player interacting and asking for help from younger players to buy in-game virtual goods is a challenge to watch, not only for the user experience requiring so many steps to buy a digital bow tie, but also because of the interactions between the players of the game.  Next up, the co-hosts take a look at the NFL’s crossover events with The Simpsons and the Toy Story characters in the VR space.  Having the analysts and color commentators as VR driven cartoon characters in the style of the Simpsons was interesting, however, Michael and Michael found  the ball and player tracking without mo-cap suits especially intriguing.  The ability to keep track of the ball and so many players in real time hints at the future for sports viewing.  The team also found it interesting how the NFL is using this technology to potentially broaden their viewership and generate additional fan engagement.

Wrapping up this week’s episode are a couple of hardware stories, the last of which speculates on the potential for the Apple Vision Pro to gain the advantage of an Apple modem to enable cellular connectivity.  This sparks a spirited discussion about hotspots vs native cellular connectivity to close out the recording.  Maybe mesh communication is the answer.

Would you prefer your computing devices to have their own cellular connection or tether to a hotspot from your phone?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

Visualizing MR

AndroidXR visualization of a Major League Baseball user experience
https://youtu.be/Pn5uG1ys-pE?feature=shared&t=80

So how many months/years do we think it’ll be before XR is abandoned like Tablets, Stadia, etc., etc., etc.?

— Al Sutton (@alsutton) 2024-12-13T19:05:18.124Z

Android Authority article: Samsung’s ‘Project Moohan’ takes shape as the first Android XR headset

omfg it's beautiful 😂

— Casey Liss (@caseyliss) 2024-12-11T20:54:12.488Z

Espresso Displays

Github AVPEnterpriseAPI-CameraStreaming

9 to 5 Mac article: Analogue is the first 3D immersive collaboration app for Apple Vision Pro, Spatial 3D design app coming soon

MR Weirdness

Road to VR article: How ‘Gorilla Tag’ Became a $100 Million VR Success on Quest

Gorilla Tag

Good Morning America article: ‘The Simpsons’ take over Monday Night Football

What’s on Disney Plus article: “Toy Story Funday Football” Becomes Most Watched Live Event On Disney+

CNBC article: What’s next for Meta’s metaverse

VR Hardware

The Verge article: Apple and Sony are working on Vision Pro support for PSVR 2 controllers

9 to 5 Mac article: Apple is reportedly exploring cellular connectivity for Vision Pro, and that’s a great thing

Games at Work e238: Walkman and Walkbot

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:34 — 46.7MB) | Embed

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