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e481 — Services You Don’t Need

By Michael Martine | September 16, 2024 - 06:24 |September 15, 2024 Podcast

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close up of two illuminated red speakers (or perhaps microphones!) on a car — Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Published 16 September 2024

Co-hosts Michael and Michael start things off with an article by Gizmodo reporting on a recent patent reportedly structured to listen to in-car conversations in order to serve up highly targeted advertising. This common refrain over the years has taken on new focus given the recent reporting about the active listening for advertisement targeting. An extreme view for how this such AR advertising may surface can be experienced in the “Hyper-Reality” YouTube video in the show notes, or the WayRay example from 2019’s CES discussed in e223.

Next up, is Lucas Martinic’s innovative example of a mixed reality pen to select a color from the environment, and then to draw in the mixed reality environment using the color of the pen. It will be easiest to check out the show notes below to see precisely how this is done. This reminds Michael and Michael of several other color picking and 3D drawing tools – check out the show notes to see these examples.

Switching to games, it is nigh impossible for Michael and Michael (and Andy) to miss commenting on a Doom experience, and the exemplar for this episode uses a volumetric display to play the classic game. A discussion on the therapeutic use of Dungeons and Dragons spurs a couple of additional sidebars including the fantastic When We Were Wizards podcast series – be sure to check this out after completing the Games at Work backlog.

Then, the co-hosts turn to another common theme across many episodes of the podcast – how generative AI will influence game experiences by customizing the experience of the player and tailoring the storytelling to their preferences. An example of this with Dungeons and Dragons can be found in episode e412 from early 2023, and there several other examples over the run of the show. The article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun deals with this theme as well, and provides fertile ground for Michael and Michael to discuss.

Rounding out the episode, the co-hosts discuss NYU’s Robot Utility Models, noticing the scratches on the drawers and a spacewalk that is not quite a spacewalk, but still a remarkable feat by civilian space travelers.

What example of Doom have you seen that Andy, Michael and Michael have not yet commented on? How might you use Lucas Martinic’s creative use of an AR color picker and pen? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!

Selected Links

Serving Up Unwanted Ads

Gizmodo article: Ford Seeks Patent for Software That Records Your Conversations to Serve You Ads

Patent US-20240289844-A1_I on documentcloud.org

Patent US20240289844A1 on Google Patents

Games at Work e479: Listen Up, Outlaws!

WayRay’s holographic windshield tech from CES 2019 – https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/videos/ces-2019-wayray-holographic-windshield-tech-will-grace-the-genesis-g80/

Games at Work e223: CES and C64

AR

Creative Bloq article: Ingenious XR colour app is an exciting glimpse into the future of digital art

8/100 "What if you could extract the color from real objects around you?"

Part of the submission for the @xraihack in Stockholm.
Using the @Logitech MX Stylus pen.#XRHACK #XR #Unity #Quest #Meta #VR #PresentFutures pic.twitter.com/k5EhnmgzIS
— Lucas Martinic (@lucas_martinic) September 9, 2024

Present Futures

Benjamin Moore Color Match Tool

3Doodler 3D Pen

Games at Work e460: AskEmilyPost: AI etiquette

Upload VR article: Steam Decktop: Steam Deck & Meta Quest HDMI Link Make A Modular Gaming PC

Games

Hackaday article: Doom on a Volumetric Display

Techdirt article: D&D, Once The Subject Of Moral Panic, Found Therapeutic In Autism Cases In Study

R&D Mag article: Virtual “SnowWorld” Help Burn Victims Cope with Extreme Pain

When We Were Wizards podcast

Wikipedia article: Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe

Ctrl-C Club blog post: Holy smokes, I just released a MiniGolf game for Palm OS in 2024

Rock, Paper, Shotgun article: Peter Molyneux thinks generative AI is the future of games, all but guaranteeing that it won’t be

Games at Work e412: 3D or Not 3D

Robots

Threads post: Robot Utility Models

Robot Utility Models

Space

CNN article: Four civilians on a daring SpaceX mission complete the first commercial spacewalk

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:09 — 47.5MB) | Embed

e480 — Time to Face the Music

By Michael Martine | September 9, 2024 - 06:01 |September 8, 2024 Blog

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black and white image of over the ear headphones — Photo by Blaz Photo on Unsplash

Published 9 September 2024

Co-hosts Michael and Michael start things off by reflecting on last week’s episode with a couple of articles related to last week’s episode on music streaming royalties.

Next up, is a listener link on MiniMax, a new text to video GenAI capability, which sparks (✨) a conversation on individualized customized entertainment. After touching on the Brave browser, the co-hosts marvel at a mycelia powered robot – another listener link. Michael and Michael are reminded of how trees communicate with one another – check out the links below for Pando and the book Michael M couldn’t remember at the time, The Overstory by Richard Powers.

Then, some speculation on the upcoming Apple Event next week – Ready to Glow. Michael R points out that the Apple Watch announcement was 10 years ago, which is hard to believe.

Rounding out this episode is the announcement between Nike and LEGO which is fun to speculate on what this partnership may bring, and an MQTT / NodeRed enabled garage door home automation solution that does not require sharing data to any cloud.

What other biohybrid robots have you heard of? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!

Selected Links

Streaming Heist

New York Times article: The Bands and the Fans Were Fake. The $10 Million Was Real.

Ars Technica article: FBI busts musician’s elaborate AI-powered $10M streaming-royalty heist

Games at Work e479: Listen Up, Outlaws!

ABA Journal post: Prominent 1970s musicians sue music companies for copyright infringement

AI

Tom’s Guide article: Forget Sora — MiniMax is a new realistic AI video generator and it’s seriously impressive

Games at Work e478: Doomed, I Say!

Brave

Futurism article: Scientists Grew a Mushroom Into This Robot to Act As Its Brain

Cornell Chronicle Article: Biohybrid robots controlled by electrical impulses — in mushrooms

Wikipedia article: Pando (tree)

Smithsonian Magazine article: Do Trees Talk to Each Other?

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

Apple

Macworld article: Ready to Glow! iPhone, Apple Watch, and everything else to expect at Apple’s event

Sixcolors post: Apple’s September event: The delight will be in the details

Apple Events

Random Thoughts blog post: WWDC 2024 Impressions and insights

Miscellany

Nike press release: Nike and the LEGO Group Unite to Elevate the Power of Sport and Creative Play

LEGO Group press release: The LEGO Group and NIKE, Inc. unite to elevate the power of creative play and sport

acquired.fm season 13, episode 1: Nike

Ars Technica article: I added a ratgdo to my garage door, and I don’t know why I waited so long

Ratgdo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:45 — 47.0MB) | Embed

e479 — Listen Up, Outlaws!

By Andy Piper | September 2, 2024 - 06:03 |September 1, 2024 Podcast

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Photo by Ruth Durbin on Unsplash

Published 2nd September 2024

Andy and Michael R. spend the show discussing advertising, AI, and games.

First up, there’s a shocking story from the excellent 404 Media that covers “the pitch deck” that Cox Media Group (CMG) uses to sell their clients on hyper targeted advertising using audio from our personal smart devices. Michael goes on to encourage us all to disable Automatic Content Recognition on our smart TVs with the help of a story from ZDNet.

In the AI segment, the co-hosts consider Midjourney’s move into hardware. Andy mentions a recent blog post of his own that looks at the good and bad ways that LLMs can be used. Bad folks are farming plays on Spotify and stealing revenue from real artists. And, why play a game that originally required a 33MHz i386 CPU with 4Mb of RAM, when you can use AI and burn megawatts of power to generate small parts of a new level?

To round things out, Michael and Andy talk the latest Star Wars game, a paper version of Oregon Trail, Dungeons and Dragons, and Michael’s desire to get a group together to play games in Demeo in VR.

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. Since we post this sentence every week it does look a bit automated, though. Anyway! That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

Advertising

404 Media article: Here’s the Pitch Deck for Active Listening Ad Targeting

How to turn off ACR

Midjourney makes Hardware

Andy’s post AI-ngels and Demons

Fake bands on Spotify

AI makes DOOM

Gaming

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:30 — 38.4MB) | Embed

e478 — Doomed, I Say!

By Michael Martine | August 26, 2024 - 06:06 |August 25, 2024 Podcast

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Games at Work in Doom font from https://c.eev.ee/doom-text-generator/

Published 26 August 2024

Co-hosts Michael, Michael and Andy start things off on a fun note – a website that creates text in Doom, Minecraft and other fonts.

Next up, the team turns to Ian Hughes for two intriguing posts over the Feeding Edge. First up is Ian’s blog and video showing the power of midjourney.com, runway.ml and luma.ai . The second post deals with Ian feeding his two novels Reconfigure and Cont3xt into a local copy of Nomic.ai on his MacBook and conversing with his protagonist. The Games at Work cohosts are all hoping that this jumpstarts the writing of third book. Ian himself imagines how a generated metaverse could be created following the ingestion of the novels.

Sticking with the theme, the team then turns to the symbolism used by many firms to signify the application of AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, sparkles ✨ are used by Google, Slack and more. This sparks (heh!) a discussion on the power of such symbolism, and Andy shares a recent blog post he wrote on the subject, with a specific focus on a symbol for the Fediverse, specifically the asterism ⁂ unicode2042. This reminds Michael M of the symbol for therefore ∴ unicode2234.

Then, the co-hosts discuss the SAG-AFTRA agreement to partner with Narrativ for the use of audio voice replicas, and the arrangement allowing the people whose voices are being used to have a significant amount of control over how and when their voices are ethically used. Michael R points out that this may have some market limiting impacts for new voices.

Once the team completes the AI review, they spend a few moments on the world of games and gaming. A Guinness world record of 444 consoles hooked into a single television is a marvel. Tramsterfam is reminiscent of Townscaper. Other games include the Smithsonian’s partnership with Crayola, the newest Sid Meyer’s CivVII and an upcoming television series called Secret Level.

What do you think about the symbolism discussed in this episode? Do you have a favorite? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!