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 171 – Jelly Jelly Bo Belly

  This episode is chock full of tasty treats, of the cellphone and robotic kinds!  Michael & Michael start off with a conversation about the Kickstarter for the Jelly phone — a 4g cell phone that is running Android Nougat (Michael M still believes it should have been Nutella) and can handle two SIM cards for, wait for it, under $100 unlocked. The pair talk about the new capabilities expected to be included with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds when announced at WWDC next week.  The ability to code in a simple-to-learn language and have that code execute in real 3d life … Continue reading

Episode 165 – Virtual Math

Phaedra, Michael and Michael get together to discuss some very interesting articles, kicking things off with how 3D pictures are used to explain mathematical concepts in a new pictorial language called Quon.  The paper explaining the concept dives into quantum concepts, including teleportation, topological algebra and Bloch spheres, quickly reaching the mathematical limits of the trio. A Fast Company article on how the Knight Foundation and Google are providing jump start grants to journalists to engage with virtual reality connects with the team, and one of the CNN 3D videos prompts Michael R to share a story about how he … Continue reading

Episode 163 – Chat Me Maybe?

Hey! I just met you. And this is cra-zy. Here’s my bot. Chat me maybe. Michael and Michael get together to enjoy some of the material covered in the Feb 22nd edition of the Daily Tech News Show, particularly around text based chat services, and where the medium is going. Michael M dives headfirst down the rabbit hole — imagining how people used to use arcane terminal commands to get things done, when this wasn’t the intent of the story — it is much more around augmenting communication with insight to enhance understanding and using context (location, time, preferences, etc) to … Continue reading