Episode 283 — Virtual Cloaks | Games At Work dot Biz

Michael M & Andy get together for a whirlwind tour of virtual real estate visits, virtual fashion on pictures of real people, faking out facial recognition and some great games.

Staring things off with how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the real estate market, making in-person tours of property more complicated, virtual reality comes to the rescue, helping prospective buyers experience the properties they are considering in a “touchless” manner, and on their own schedule. Andy is reminded of how hot the real estate market is right now, with a story about a two bedroom flat with a pool in London. Seems that with the price it is commanding, there are many Londoners who want to beat the heat.

Long time listeners of the podcast will be very familiar with the idea of buying virtual objects, clothing and skins for in-game and in virtual world use, however, we have a story from Vogue this week that has a new twist on the idea of virtual fashion. Tribute makes virtual clothing that you can buy to “wear” in a picture you might share on social media. While the idea of virtually trying on clothes in a mirror has been around for a while, this idea of having something for a picture is new. The clothing is specially designed and has a limited release, so while it is literally “ready to wear”, you won’t likely have the same outfit as one of your friends on their Snap or Insta feed.

Speaking of pictures, an intriguing new pieces of software has come out of the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab called Fawkes, which helps people make subtle changes to their own pictures that they call “image cloaking”, which prevents machine learning models from associating the picture of you with you, rather building in distortion into the model. Given the prevalence of systems that have already scraped billions of publicly available photos, this is an important step in protecting individuals from being part of facial recognition models.

We were excited to see that mmhmm is now coming out of the limited beta release, and the team has had a bit of a chance to play with it over the weekend. The production quality is impressive and it is easy to see there are many ways this could be useful.

Andy and Michael share some new games they are excited about and looking forward to playing.

We’d love to hear from you, what you think about these stories, and what games you’re playing. Drop us a line below, or find us on Twitter @gamesatwork_biz ! Hope you enjoy this episode!

Selected Links

BBC news article: Virtual house hunting gets a pandemic boost — https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53478010

Secret London article: This Two-Bedroom London Flat With An Indoor Pool Is Making The Internet Lose Its Mind — https://secretldn.com/two-bedroom-flat-with-swimming-pool/

Matterport — https://matterport.com

Vogue article: Would You Spend Real Money on Virtual Clothes? — https://www.vogue.com/article/tribute-virtual-clothes-digital-fashion

Tribute — https://tribute-brand.com