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e412 — 3D or not 3D

By Michael Martine | April 17, 2023 - 06:14 |April 16, 2023 Podcast

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3D picture of a book with a silhouette of a face due to the folds of the paper and light shining on it — Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

summary

Published 17 April 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael are back at it again for another edition of Games at Work after taking a much needed break. After starting off with a few of the current features in film in theater, the co-hosts kick off this episode with a set of stories about 3D vision that does not require a headset. One example uses holographic technology to render objects in 3D, and another example from Sony shows objects in 3D in a television style screen.

Then, shifting gears, the team considers a recently published paper and accompanying RPG simulation of a town populated with 25 AIs. Looking at similarities and differences with the Sims and Simlish, some intriguing ideas are floated about how generative conversational AI could be employed to continue the storyline of a game where NPCs (non-player characters) could be powered by the conversational AI in a non proscriptive manner to further the story of the game. This follows on the show notes from e410 and gives an interesting idea of how 25 AIs could be seeded into an environment with social rules in a GAN way to see what happens.

Continuing on the theme of AI, the co-hosts discuss a GPT4-powered program that is designed to correct bugs automatically, codenamed Wolverine. This in turn spurs a thought about self-healing concrete. An amazing Medium post explores how ChatGPT and GPT4 was used to play the role of a dungeon master in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. You have to read through this post to experience just how good this interaction was. Frederico Viticci of MacStories introduces S-GPT on MacStories. S-GPT is an iOS Shortcut that connects ChatGPT with the native iOS features in an amazing way. This reminded Andy of Short Circuit (the app, not the movie). Wrapping things up for this episode, the team concludes with the prompt library called Jailbreak Chat.

How many AIs would you want to put in your version of a small RPG Minecraft town? Would you want to have your digital assistant on your phone access GPT4, and if so, what would you ask? 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. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. We even talked about this during the show!

Selected Article Links

Current Theater & Film

Wikipedia article: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Wikipedia article: Beetlejuice the Musical

Wikipedia article: Air (the movie)

3D spaces

StudyFinds article: Next generation of 3D virtual reality is here and won’t require a headset

Mixed News article: New 27-inch display from Sony offers 3D without VR headset

TechCrunch article: A decade later, this VR treadmill is finally ready to ship

AI

Ars Technica article: Surprising things happen when you put 25 AI agents together in an RPG town

Pre-computed replay of a simulation that accompanies the paper entitled “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior.“

Ars Technica article: Developer creates “regenerative” AI program that fixes bugs on the fly

Interesting Engineering: DARPA is exploring self-healing concrete for military installations

The Register article: Turns out people don’t like it when they suspect a machine’s talking to them

Medium post by Obie Fernandez: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

MacStories article: Introducing S-GPT, A Shortcut to Connect OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Native Features of Apple’s Operating Systems

Short Circuit: An AI Assistant

Jailbreak Chat

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:41 — 44.9MB) | Embed

e411 — PavARotti is my CoPilot

By Michael Martine | April 3, 2023 - 06:14 |April 2, 2023 Podcast

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interior of a theater, depth of field image showing red audience chairs — Photo by Kilyan Sockalingum on Unsplash

Published 3 April 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael have the information on which country is the happiest on earth: Finland! In a possibly related piece of news, the Finnish National Opera have created a 1:1 digital twin of their stage, which provides them now unlimited stage time for blocking, lighting design and much more. This reminded Michael and Andy of their VR experiences with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s performance of Dream. Then, the co-hosts break on through to the Otherside, reacting to the article and video from the Yuga Labs experience. The cacophony of voices and avatars teeming in the environment are simultaneously amazing and disconcerting. Rounding out the metaverse portion of the episode, Michael, Michael and Andy consider an article about jobs you would only find in the metaverse.

Switching gears to the ongoing fascination about generative AI, an article in Fortune spells out the workflow a university professor used to create a marketing campaign with the ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine, generate images with Midjourney, script a video with voiceover and “film” the video, all in the span of 30 minutes. Both Google and Microsoft have put out a great deal of content to show how they envision productivity increasing tremendously – a couple of short videos are included in the show notes below. It is quite simple to imagine from these articles and videos the integrated toolchain to go from ideation to instantiation faster than ever before. The co-hosts also discuss an article about how Microsoft’s Copilot AI is also being used to accelerate security through DevSecOps in an AIOps manner. A LinkedIn post by Peter Nixey provides an opportunity to consider the far-reaching implications of what was ingested in GPT3 and GPT4 from sources such as StackOverflow, and how this may change when knowledge is pooled into the transformer as weightings.

A rich treasure trove of articles the co-hosts did not have a chance to review on the podcast are included below for your perusal. And maybe for ingestion into GPT5. Who knows?

What performances would you like to see in VR? How can massively multiplayer environments be shrunk and simplified from the perspective of the user? How do you think Q&A exchanges will evolve in the future? 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. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

so, @settinger designed and printed a comic sans typewriter ball so we're testing it on my IBM selectric this afternoon and it totally does work!

— Emily Velasco (@MLE_online) 2023-03-29T22:15:23.806Z

Printables post: Contest theme: Dice Storage (Finished)

Cults 3D design post: CAPYBARA DICE POND

Entertainment – TV, Video, Games, LEGO

Vice article: The Cure Tried to Stop Scalpers. Brokers Are Selling Entire Ticketmaster Accounts Instead

The Verge article: Paramount Plus has renewed Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Tje Verge article: The Diablo IV beta let players do a lot — but not pet the dog

Brickfanatics article: Fan-made coffee table combines two LEGO Star Wars UCS sets

Brothers Brick article: Across the fields of Pelennor, Gandalf rides to Minas Tirith

The Verge article: 9 cool new games from GDC 2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:51 — 39.4MB) | Embed

e410 — Wonder Llama of Days Gone By

By Michael Martine | March 27, 2023 - 06:02 |March 27, 2023 Podcast

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Photo by Carrie Borden on Unsplash

Published 27 March 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael start things off for this edition of Games at Work with a set of #AI stories featuring the speed at which the landscape continues to evolve. In the past week, per an article from The Verge, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing chatbots are referring to and reinforcing one another’s hallucinations. This is reminiscent of the chatbot interactions from back in 2016 when people would put their home assistants into an infinite loop – check out the show notes for an example of this. The potential for deliberate misinformation insertion looms large in a way that even wikipedia editors may not be able to manage.

The new plug in capabilities for OpenAI’s ChatGPT announced this week provide for ways for ChatGPT to quickly gain additional skills and capabilities. It’s been well documented how mathematical prompts create problems for ChatGPT, however now with the ability to add plug ins, the sophisticated computations of WolframAlpha is now possible within the conversational AI interface.

An article from Polygon explores the concept of having generative AI produce the script for non player characters (NPCs) in video games. This could be easily extended to having the background characters have broader conversational involvement with players, fitting the genre, speech and including a degree of randomness to provide an even more engaging experience for the player – not only generating the script for these NPCs to “read”.

Turning to the metaverse, these ideas about conversational AIs turn toward the 3d representation of the NPCs and more. One article deals with how Epic’s MetaHumans could be animated using just the power of a person’s phone. Another one focuses on a couple that got married in a virtual Taco Bell – something that the co-hosts have seen before, once upon a time.

Wrapping up this episode the team touches on a cool LEGO lunar poster build, a Diablo IV update and news about a forthcoming Devo documentary.

What new skills would you like to see ChatGPT gain? How do you expect to determine what is true vs what is a generative hallucination? 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. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

AI

— Dgar (@dgar) 2023-03-20T02:27:11.280Z

The Verge article: Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation s***show

Games at Work e181 – Robotic Rockband

OpenAI ChatGPT Plugins

Stephen Wolfram Writings post: ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!

WolframAlpha

Polygon article: Ubisoft is testing an AI tool that writes NPC dialogue

Wikipedia article: Arrow in the knee

Ars Technica article: Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer.

Adobe Firefly beta

Metaverse-y

Boy Genius Report article: You’ll soon be able to animate Epic’s realistic MetaHumans using your iPhone

womp.com

Gizmodo article: They Got Married in a Taco Bell in the Metaverse

NY Magazine Intelligencer article: Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.

TechCrunch article: Metaverse is just VR, admits Meta, as it lobbies against ‘arbitrary’ network fee

Miscellany

Yanko Design article: LEGO LUNAR POSTER IS A 2360-PIECE DIY WALL-ART THAT’S PERFECT FOR SPACE ENTHUSIASTS

Kotaku article: Diablo IV’s Butcher Is Leaving Players Shooketh

Rolling Stone article: Devo Are Getting Their First-Ever Authorized Documentary

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:11 — 39.7MB) | Embed

e409 — Promptly VR

By Michael Martine | March 20, 2023 - 06:14 |March 19, 2023 Podcast

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Raspberry Pi circuit board — Photo by Vishnu Mohanan on Unsplash

Published 20 March 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael start things off for this edition of Games at Work with a series of virtual reality stories. After discussing Spotify’s WonkaVision for how to create realistic depth from a webcam, the team considers whether VR influencers can “save the metaverse”. Next up, it’s Second Life’s 20th anniversary! The party is scheduled for June 23rd, and opportunities for performers are open at the SL website. After talking about Microsoft Mesh 3D avatars being added to Microsoft Teams, the co-hosts turn to the increasingly hot topic of AI.

Stories include AI ethics, OpenAI’s transparency, instructions on how to run GPT-3 on a Raspberry Pi and an extensive treatment on the level of hype that is eclipsing crypto. There’s even a new show launching this fall on Peacock with an AI as the central character – check out the trailer for Mrs. Davis in the show notes below. What is her quest? The Holy Grail, of course.

Disney’s quest to create a more realistic lightsaber has resulted in something quite special – and while it’s been around for a while, the video from SXSW is incredible. Diablo IV is in an open beta right now, and in the US, you can get a chance to join in the fun by buying a special sandwich at KFC.

Who would you like to see perform at #SL20B ? What is your quest? 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. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.