While Michael is away flying thru the skies, Michael asks long time listener and all around excellent dude ePredator – AKA Ian Hughes, to join and talk about interesting events around gaming technology and CES 2019.
Ian, is the founder of Feeding Edge and an analyst with 451 Research, where he focuses on enterprise use of emerging technology. In particular IoT and its impact across all industry. This includes AR VR and emerging interfaces and Industrial IoT. Researching, writing, presenting and advising on the subject.
Michael and Michael start 2019 off with the wide world of sports, eSports to be specific, and the story of one Twitch celebrity Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who plays Fortnight about 12 hours a day for his millions of subscribers. His efforts resulted in nearly $10 million in income in 2018. It is incredible that there is such money in sponsorships, subscriptions and advertising related to online game playing, and in the wider esports tournaments as well.
Turning to their thoughts to wearables, Michael R talks about a Microsoft haptic wristband, and his personal experience with the therapeutic benefits of electric muscle stimulation. The pair follow up the haptic conversation, with one on smart fabrics, and what could be done via fabric to interact with the wearer — maybe giving them extrasensory perception of the world around them. Neil Harbisson gave an interesting TED talk on what it’s like to hear color, and how he can hear colors that cannot be seen by the human eye.
Mapping the world is becoming more and more important, especially as keeping mapping data up to date requires an incredible amount of energy and time from the map owners. Validating that a point of interest is still there, open and available to visit makes the difference between a frustrated user and a very satisfied one. Michael R puts forth the terrific idea that there’s a win-win-win strategy to be employed, where the map data owner benefits from crowdsourcing the effort of keeping the maps up to date, the individual doing the updates benefits via contests/games/microtransactions, and the business establishment benefits as well from the attention of 3rd parties. While there are many examples of this kind of action — road munching from the early days of Waze, Swarm/Foursquare, Yelp reviews, the benefit to the crowdsource participant to improve/validate the map has not really been cracked yet.
As 2018 winds down, Michael and Michael get together one more time to bring you your dose of game technology used for business, and the links for this week did not disappoint. Starting off with the Madrid company Gamelearn, Michael and Michael dig into how their ADA game shows how gamification can increase engagement and educational outcomes for businesses.
The HopeBand wearable created by Carnegie Mellon researchers is an intriguing concept to help with the opioid overdose epidemic by constantly monitoring blood oxygen levels, and signaling for help when the wearer might not be able to help themselves.
Continuing on the medical theme, scientists in Cambridge created a virtual reality model of cancer cells taken from a biopsy, allowing them to see in even greater detail the geography of a tumor. Prof Karen Vousden of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, runs a lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London and says how such data visualization is critical to developing new therapies.
The data visualization of the map a Roomba robot makes of your living room can be repurposed to create a Doom level through the use of a plugin to Rich Whitehouse’s Noesis tool.
We wish you all the very best for health and happiness in 2019 and look forward to connecting with you in the coming year!
Michael and Michael start off this week’s show with a discussion on privacy, spurred by advances in facial recognition technology, and Microsoft’s stance on what overarching principles should guide their (and other tech company’s) development and use of the technology for a variety of purposes, including commerce and law enforcement to name just two.
Moving from the physical to the virtual, Michael R notes that there is now an ability to create your own islands in Fortnight, much like what could be done in Second Life.
In the wearables space, the team have two examples: a retro sneaker that’s been updated with new wireless technology for exercise tracking, while retaining the same form factor that it was initially issued with, and Tesla’s use of AR to spot defects on the assembly line.
Closing out on an AR note, the team talks about the Ghostbusters World game which allows you to bust ghosts yourself. Is there something strange in your neighborhood? Give this game a try!
