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Immersive light show experience at the Chicago Botanic Garden Dec 2023 — Picture by Michael Martine, Chicago Botanic Garden, Dec 2023

Published 29 January 2024

Michael, Michael and Andy are back in studio to talk tech. Immersive engagement stories from Microsoft, Disney, Apple and Samsung lead off the topics for this episode.

Staring with Microsoft, now Microsoft Teams supports 3D and VR sessions. Then, the team turns to Disney for a very foundational (heh) innovation. Lanny Smoot, Disney Research Fellow and Imagineer says “Being an Imagineer is using technology in the service of making people happy”. As the inventor of (among many other things) the latest version of the extendable light saber, he is also the inventor of the HoloTile, a surface that allows people to walk on it in any direction without moving across the floor. See the embedded video below – which Disney shared only a few days ago and has already racked up over a million views. The Samsung Galaxy Ring will be available later this year.

Turning to the world of AI, the team discusses Nightshade, an application from the University of Chicago makers of Glaze, discussed in August 2023. This application allows artists and makers to disrupt scraping of their content. Coincidentally and kind of related, food bloggers are also incorporating nightshade (notice the lowercase N, as this is the plant and not the app), in very small white on white text to confuse the scraping done by cooked.wiki. And staying on the AI and food theme, but with one more twist, Michael M shares the announcement video for Hava, which uses visual recognition AI to identify food and present users with insights into diet satiety and satisfaction.

This episode contains a more detailed discussion on the Apple Vision Pro, which if you haven’t yet put in your order for one, they are reportedly sold out. Michael R shares experiences and thoughts in preparing code for the Vision Pro, especially with the enormous number of applications that will function in VisionOS right from the product launch. While people are saying Happy Birthday to the Vision Pro, it should be noted that it is also the Mac’s 40th birthday.

The team rounds out this episode with thanks to Ingenuity, which has flown 72 flights above the martian surface.

What is your favorite immersive experience from the past year? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!