Everything metaverse from Horizon Worlds to @character_ai to Virtua Fighter to mid-1800s 3D photosculpture scanning & back again to the Matrix’s Bullet Time. + #AI & #3D
Starting things off for this episode, Michael and Michael reflect on how people are using the Stadia hardware controller for other platforms in a call back to last week’s show. Then they go full metaverse with a series of articles from the Verse, Terrence Eden and Hackernoon to work through idea concepts of using your own tools to make your tools better (Horizon Worlds), to ideas from Terrence on what ideas may be great for a VR experience, to the nature of operating systems to efficiently allow humans to interact with the computing hardware (metaverse operating systems).
In an AI exploration, Michael R creates a Games At Work AI in Character.AI and interacts with it. This exemplar is amazingly advanced from the early days of chatbots, and reminds Michael and Michael about the concept of ingesting/seeding a chatbot’s corpus with, oh, say a decade plus worth of text-to-speech podcasting. Longtime Games At Work listeners will remember intriguing discussion about this topic going all the way back to 2012. See the links to episodes 26 and 218, 328 and 366 in the show notes below for prior discussion on this theme.
Stable Diffusion raises its head again, this time in the form of modernizing the 1993 Virtua Fighter video game, and some high res examples of what the characters (not Character.AI) might look like. Although a combination play between video game characters and Character.AI would be an interesting thing.
In the everything old is new again theme, an article from Hackaday show how the visual effects from the Matrix had origins in the mid-to-late 1800s with photosculpture scanning using 24 cameras in a circle around the subject. Amazing.
What video game character(s) would you like to see Stable Diffusion or Character.AI applied to? Drop us a line at @gamesatwork_biz and let us know!
Selected Article Links
The Verge article: Stadia fans are finding ways to use its controller wirelessly with other platforms
Metaverse
The Verge article: Meta’s flagship metaverse app is too buggy and employees are barely using it, says exec in charge
Terence Eden’s Blog post: Would you go to the Job Centre or DMV in the Metaverse?
Hackernoon article: The Metaverse Needs an Operating System
AI
Wikipedia: Eliza chatbot
Games at Work e366: MetaMoney
Games at Work e328: Classic BMW
Games at Work e218: Virtually Married
Games at Work e26: Business Process Management and Immortality
3D
Ars Technica article: Begone, polygons: 1993’s Virtua Fighter gets smoothed out by AI
Hackaday article: In a way, 3D scanning is over a century old
the Matrix Wiki: Bullet Time
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Such a fun episode, Michael & Andy! Loved your discussion on Life by You.