Episode 327 — Virtually Athletic | Games At Work dot Biz

Draw Something gameplay dragon — Michael M & Michael R’s Draw Something gameplay from 2012

Virtual taekwando sparring, AI painting, LEGO brick finding & building, flying cars and cloud gaming

Michael and Michael start things off with this episode riffing on Ian Hughes’ blog post, focused on the use of Refract technology by the World Taekwando federation for distanced sparring. Ian’s blog post drew parallels to the Microsoft Kinect in the way that Refract’s use of body sensors provided information to a video game style experience where the player’s body was the controller. Michael R was impressed with the concept that future Olympics might consider such contests for inclusion. Michael M loved the thought of this applied to other training experiences to help people develop their martial arts skills and provide the instructor the dynamic feedback from their students. The HomeCourt app is a great example of AI applied via an iOS app to improve your basketball skills.

Painting with AI

Continuing on the AI theme, a listener tweet highlights nVidia’s Canvas application, which takes simple MS-Paint style brushstrokes and converts them into realistic landscape images. So, if your PBS lessons from Bob Ross didn’t quite get you to the artistic level you hoped for, give this a try. And if you’d rather try drawing dragons instead of waterfalls, you can chase your artistic dreams using the AI from CLIPDraw instead. These stories reminded the cohosts of playing Draw Together, and the image above is from a game they played several years ago.

Flying Cars & Cloud Gaming

For those of us continually saying “I thought we’d have flying cars by now”, rest assured that you’re right. A BBC article shows such a flying car, that looks much like a gravity bound surface transportation, only with wings that really made a trip between airports. And this brought forward an article with new updates for MSFT Flight Simulator. While Michael M has noted on several recent episodes how he does not have a Windows gaming rig, more and more companies are moving their games to the cloud, which means that any internet device could theoretically be used to play games. Check out the NYT article on this topic.

AI and LEGO builds

A fantastic new iOS app called Brickit can take a pile of LEGO bricks, scan them, and then show you what you could build from them. Complete with step-by-step instructions. And it remembers where the brick is in the pile, showing you the brick you need with AR. Michael and Michael were both in awe. LEGO Education is partnering up with NASA for Artemis I with specialized lesson plans and builds to inspire STEM learning.

Mini Mac & Dancing Droids

This week, we have an intriguing build of a miniature computer that runs MacOS — check out the show notes for the video. And in addition to this mini Mac, there’s a fun video of synchronized Boston Robotics Spot robots dancing in a most mesmerizing way.

Space Robots

NASA is also in the news this week with good news from Mars in the form of a dramatic picture of the rover. More challenging is the story about the Hubble telescope, whose computers are experiencing difficulties. Thinking about the expected useful life of these spacefaring systems, it is amazing that they continue to last years and years longer than originally designed.

Pick of the week: iSmartClock

While Games At Work has not had a software recommendation recently, this week is a bit different. iSmartClock v2.0 was just updated on the MacOS app store, and it is a tremendous update, chock full of bug fixes and new features. Michael M loves the minimal design quality of this app. He especially likes having a translucent analog clock that floats above the windows at all times, and that gracefully disappears when he needs to get to something under it.

Wrapping up this week’s episode are several stories of movies and miniseries – check out the notes below.

Selected Links

Feeding Edge blog post – Martial arts in the metaverse: https://www.feedingedge.co.uk/blog/2021/06/29/martial-arts-in-the-metaverse/

Refract — https://refract.gg

NPR article: Tug Of War, Bike Polo Among Retired Olympic Events — https://www.npr.org/2012/07/20/157129988/tug-of-war-bike-polo-among-retired-olympic-events

Microsoft Kinect — https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/kinect/

HomeCourt: Basketball Training — https://www.homecourt.ai

@GamesAtWork_Biz enticing virtual worlds via rudimentary MS paint skills… 🎨

leave the artistic interpretation to the tech! 👩‍🎨 🖥

no camera required 🛑 📸 https://t.co/2kRnKih1U9
— 𝓛𝔁𝓼 / 𝔸𝕝𝕖𝕩𝕚𝕤 🏵🇪🇺💫 (@Lxs) June 28, 2021

nVidia’s Canvas — https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/

PBS WUCF Artisodes: Bob Ross — https://www.pbs.org/video/wucf-artisodes-wucf-artisodes-short-bob-ross/

CLIPDraw is a way to synthesize stroke-based drawings based on natural language input.

New work w/ @crosslabstokyo @err_more @okw !

blog: https://t.co/uPd1vZZOmB
arxiv: https://t.co/aXVIMfETSF
Colab notebook: https://t.co/2soyjd4zpe pic.twitter.com/JAQfrkPcQo
— Kevin Frans (@kvfrans) June 29, 2021