e436 — Squishy Purple Doom

purple abstract illustration
Photo by Anni Roenkae: https://www.pexels.com/photo/purple-abstract-illustration-3109850/

Published 16 October 2023

Michael and Michael start off this show with the amazing news that friend of the podcast, Ian Hughes is on his 16th headset as he shared the unboxing of his shiny new Meta Quest 3.  Andy joins in the conversation, fresh from his flight from London, so all three co-hosts are in North Carolina for the recording of this episode!  Staying on the user experience theme, and connecting with a long-running interest of the co-hosts, Michael and Michael talk about a guitar used to control Doom.  Next up is a story about Brilliant Lab’s ChatGPT-powered monocle.  Andy brought his monocle with him from London, allowing Michael and Michael to give it a try.  The co-hosts discuss the Freewrite Traveler writing device.  See “Thyme Lord” Alton Brown’s treatment on unitaskers in the show notes below.

Moving along to AI, this week’s episode has several stories on translations, from glasses that translate speech to augmented reality text, to AI that translates the spoken word to other languages in the style of the speaker. The Content Credentials mark, designed to identify the provenance of AI generated material sparks a conversation on what constitutes generative AI content.  Another AI story describes the design for a generative walking robot made from from Northwestern University constructed of a squishy blob that actually walks.  Check out the video of this purple blob in the show notes.  This story reminded the co-hosts of the AI that figured out the Q*bert game from episode 225.

Switching gears to several automotive stories, the team takes a look at GM’s focus on the open source uProtocol to attract developers.  A story about the IDRA Gigapress expansion to Ford and Hyundai shows how this manufacturing technique is dramatically accelerating automotive manufacturing processes.

Do you believe photo filters should have a Content Credentials mark?  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 Article Links

UI/UX

Hackaday article: Playing the Guitar of Doom

Stuff article: I strapped a ChatGPT-powered monocle to my face for a week

Games at Work e406 — AI Lemmings

Scientific American article: New Glasses Can Transcribe Speech in Real Time

Freewrite Traveler

AI

Axios article: Prompt: Using AI to change videos from English to other languages

The Verge article: Adobe created a symbol to encourage tagging AI-generated content

Content Credentials

Gizmodo article: ‘Instant Evolution’: AI Creates a Squishy Purple Blob That Uses Air to Walk

Games at Work e225 — Ah ha — it’s AI!

Automotive Innovation

The Verge article: GM now has its own API for software developers to make cool apps for its cars

The Verge article: GM created its own open-source software protocol and wants its competitors to use it

AutoBlog article: Ford, Hyundai follow Tesla’s lead, buy ‘gigapresses’ from casting machine maker IDRA

IDRA Gigapress

Bonus Links