Episode 179 – May The Merch Be With You

BB-9E augmented reality In honor of Force Friday part deux, Michael and Michael geek out on all the awesomeness that is Star Wars merchandise now available for sale. You could use have a Lenovo-enabled lightsaber battle. You could build your own R2-D2 with a littleBits kit. You could own your very own Corellian freighter of your very own, putting together over 7,500 pieces in the new, and most awesome Millennium Falcon model from Lego. Switching gears, the team discusses the interaction among & between conversational artificial intelligences, and how they could do a platform of platform strategy play to talk … Continue reading

Episode 177 – What could possibly go wrong?

This episode has it all — from virtual reality, to augmented reality to mixed reality to real reality. Starting off with UPS’s VR driver training for their truck fleet, journeying to the Apollo astronaut training efforts with the Zeiss Model VI Planetarium Projector and the excitement of Apple’s recent World Wide Developer’s Conference, Michael and Michael discuss the exciting developments caused Tim Cook to say that he’s so excited about it, “I just want to yell out and scream.” Michael and Michael reminisce about the early days of the US Army’s use of there.com to provide a “real” virtual reality … Continue reading

Episode 172 – Shining a light on AR

Michael and Michael are back — and take a long careful look at the newest capabilities that Apple is bringing to light in augmented reality with the new iOS 11 operating system.  Michael R has already downloaded the development framework, and has started bringing into mixed reality the digital test objects, to great effect.  The pictures included in this post are from Michael R’s experiments with the framework thus far, and it is quite amazing to see the fidelity of the objects, as well as the recognition by the software of the planes, shadows & angles of placement.  There much … Continue reading

Episode 170 – Holographic Whiteboard Penguins

  Michael and Michael kick off this episode with holographic dragons demoed by the folks at Microsoft Research.  Beside the amazing ability to project monoscopic holograms within the frame of a normal set of eyeglasses, another really exciting aspect of this innovation is the ability to use the processor to correct for astigmatism or other eyesight issues. Moving from one collaborative display means to another, Michael & Michael talk about Google’s recently announced Jamboard and Michael R shares his experiences with the Ricoh interactive whiteboards.  Mural is another example of a collaboration solution that allows for multiple people to interact … Continue reading