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This is GamesItWork.biz, your weekly podcast about gaming, technology, and play.
Your hosts are Michael Martine, Andy Piper, and Michael Rowe.
The thoughts and opinions on this podcast are those of the hosts and guests alone,
and are not the opinions of any organization which they have been, are, or may be, affiliated with.
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This is episode 515, seeing through walls.
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Hello everybody, welcome once again to games at work dot biz, your weekly technology podcast,
my name is Andy Piper and joining me for this exciting show talking about all things tech, AI,
gaming and vision are two friends of mine called Michael. I'm going to kick it across the first of all to Mr. Michael Rowe. How are you?
Hey, Andy, I am doing well, and I am happy to be here, and I don't know if it's going to be exciting.
It's going to be interesting, but not like in the interesting time's aspect. It's just interesting. Michael, welcome back, and how are you?
interesting all right all right
great and it's wonderful that we're all together so what let's let's see how interesting we can make it yes well that's the that's purpose of having three co-host right you know we swap in we swap out we keep things rolling and yeah and well let's let's start rolling with with our first couple of stories here we found independently some news about Mr. Vader as he's known to his friends, Darth, as he's known to people who...
At least this week.
Yep.
Keep the audience guessing.
[laughs]
are not his friends, and they're not his friends for long.
I thought people who are not his friends know him as
Yeah, there's that.
So in Fortnite, there is a non-player character of Darth Vader.
So no surprise that this part of the Marvel and Star Wars cinematic universe is in Fortnite,
which is really cool.
However, we're starting off with a story from Wired that's talking about how people,
Shocker are able to bypass
some of the AI filters and get Darth Vader to do some things that maybe it wasn't originally thought of to design to do but he does anyway.
Well, this was, as we've talked in the pre-show kind of a, yeah, and we kind of expect this, this is,
this is like the meets men requirement of any AI story nowadays is, can you make it say things it shouldn't,
right? And so, yes, success. Thank you for tonight.
So maybe the more intriguing thing that comes afterwards, though, is the Kotaku article that's talking about, "Hey, Fortnite is having some challenges being placed by the screen actor skilled."
And my high-level read of this that I took away is a little bit more interesting, is that the screen actor skilled, and we've talked about this before too, as filed, what do they call this an unfair labor practice charge with the national labor relations
board because of this actor. Now, the family estate had provided a mechanism by which James Earl Jones's voice could be used and this was done with his and the estate's permission. So to me, this is like, okay, another nothing burger because if that was done under those terms and conditions, it makes sense to move in this direction. Yeah.
- Well, it was licensed, right?
I mean, it's not just could use, it could be licensed.
And this is one of these interesting things.
When we talk about AI in general and the mass consumption of data and reusing that data in ways that it may not be expected or it may not actually have been licensed for,
that's a very different story than a licensed use of a pre-provided set of data
or generation of an AI voice.
I mean, as we talked about again before the show started,
I mean, James Earl Jones actually did some additional recordings late in life to ensure that his voice was saved and could be licensed as a means for providing for his estate.
But you know, I do understand both sides of this story from the standpoint of, you know, this is setting a point.
precedent where those people with recognizable voices who have a a marketable voice may be able to survive longer, career wise, thereby reducing the on-ramp for new voice actors to get into the business because which would you rather have?
James Earl Jones doing the voice acting for the next Darth Vader cartoon in the Clone Wars saga or some guy who's starting out who has a great resonant deep voice who might charge more because he's trying to make a living at it, not just make royalties.
Yeah, so at what point after death, are you still beholden to other contractual rights that are trying to be established by others too, right?
No, no, no, not a contract thing. No. No, no, not a contract thing at all It's a market thing. How do you grow? It's it's the same discussion I had with a with a boss and mentor years ago about where we were like distributing our development team He's like, don't worry. You'll be fine. All the technical leaders are gonna be here and like that's not how it works
People on ramping to a career and they will grow into be the next generation and technical leaders and eventually
No technical people at all locally anymore and that's exactly what this is doing with acting is if there's no on ramp to a career
There is no career
not an easy thing to fix. And you give a good analogy and a great example. I think you can do the same sort of thing though if you say, "Well, recorded music would do the same as well," because if I can sample recorded music, what is the benefit of paying potentially more money for someone to play music
either live or to be recorded for something else? If I could just license what was already created,
No. And we've seen that in the recording industry too, right? With streaming music,
Right? Yeah.
people only really, unless you're a big megastar, the people who are trying to make a journeyman's living are constantly touring because that's a live performance and people will pay to go see you there. Please.
I'm going to cut in at this point because we seem to be really sticking on this particular topic and let's move along instead of, move along like the stormtroopers say, these aren't the droids you're looking for, move along and it is just, it is frustrating and humans are going to human, people are going to misuse the technologies that they're given which which is an immediate use case here.
Yes. This is not the story you're listening for.
But hopefully the technologies that Google announced at I/O this week will not immediately be misused by everyone.
What do we think?
I didn't see all of them, but what I did do is I used Notebook LM that Google provided of all their content to allow me to look at what are the top 10 or 5 things that would be interesting.
I thought their XR designs of their glasses that they were proposing fairly quickly look interesting.
They look like a maturity and a more consumer friendly version of Google Glass, but with a lot more of those functions that people thought glass would have, but never did.
I think this is all very interesting.
I think the piece you talked about mentioned about XR and Glass is interesting, but a couple of elements of the whole set of announcements that came out this week at Google I/O are fascinating.
One of them is, you know, there's the traditional verge article with the 15 links to the top 15 things, and then you go through and each of those clicks into the next level of detail, but as Michael, you just said, Google themselves then release a notebook L.M.
resource that let you drill into the announcements that links to all of Google's own announcement,
as the input, and then you can interrogate it.
So what do I do?
I'm a Google user.
I have a subscription because it's a Google one because I want to use a storage for things with the family that gives me access to, you know, the sort of next level up of Gemini.
Are you going to use Ultra?
So I pop into the notebook alone and I say, okay, based on my personal specific usage of Google's
that you should know about because you're Google, which of these announcements do you see being most useful?
who and it blew up.
Do they point you at the verge article?
And can you guess what happened, Jensman?
Ultra, the $250 a month plan.
Neither of those things, it simply just started reciting the average most useful products to an average Google user, even though I then went on to specifically say, no, no,
Oh no.
Aww, big fail.
don't know, based on what you know about my specific usage across the Google products week.
that's what I'm saying yeah and you're logged in as you in your Google One account that you're paying for that has access to all your data
That's what I'm asking about, not the average user, not the general median, yeah, 100 percent.
But how how lockdown are you from a privacy perspective?
So if I'm asking, you know, I do have access to some of the other things in, let's say, Google Drive or whatever it will look at my stuff and tell me.
Either way, it should at least be able to say, "Oh, Andy has a Gmail account."
So here's some features in Gmail.
I would imagine.
So, so, so what you're saying is it was just as good as Apple intelligence.
Frustrating, disappointing.
[laughter]
Yes, exactly right, exactly right.
So, look, the other cool thing that you could do with this is a feature of Notebook Lm is that you can then generate an audio conversation, which will generate you that cool radio
while talking heads type conversation about the announcements, which could be useful,
but probably not from my perspective because I can flip through the Virg, scroll through the Virg article, see if there are things in there that look intriguing and click through to them.
I'm a bit impressed with the way that they went all in on doing the announcements and then putting all the announcements into a Notebook Lm, that was smart.
really outcomes because they haven't really helped me.
- Yeah, I was disappointed for a different reason, Andy.
I played with a notebook LM before for other things,
where it's helped me get smart fast.
And I've been able to do things like,
okay, here's a book where the text of the book might be available open source,
so go summarize it for me, play me a podcast,
and by the time I get to my destination,
I've at least gotten a little smarter on the subject.
So I thought, hey, this is super,
I could do the same thing here.
So I did.
I had it generate an audio for me, which it took a little time for it to generate the audio and it was doing this through a web page and then as I started on my trip home just half an hour drive. I had it start playing where I failed in the end was when my phone locked it stopped playing.
So at a stop sign is like, okay, unlock the phone press the play button again and then a little ways later it stopped.
Again, because my phone locked and the audio stopped playing and I was like, ah, come on.
I have the same problem when when I get the preview of the this show sent through in Apple messages and I start playing it in the in the car through messages and then my phone locks and yeah I lose it stops playing which is which is annoying well look let's let's really quickly hit that hit on let's really quickly hit on a couple of the announcements here It's really, really fast.
Yeah, but that's that's Apple doing that to you.
Maybe.
[laughing]
[laughter]
Aren't these great problems to have translate?
So Michael, you mentioned the glasses, which I think is interesting.
I think it's interesting, I'm not surprising, but they've gone with a third party and they've chosen X-Real, which are the folks that were building those kind of glasses that we've seen mentioned a few times, yeah, the kind of glasses that let, and for somebody's built like a sliver deck version where you can just walk around with his X-Real glasses on and have his virtual screens and stuff.
Mm-hmm
Montjean monitor glasses. Yep. Yep.
was pretty cool. Again, Google have been down the
classes root before. Let's see what happens this time because they do love to cancel things and give and just give up after a short period of time. The one that jumped out at me here is that project star line which was their 3D video chat booth. I'm sure we must have talked about it in a previous year's show.
But there was aimed at opposite office spaces. It's going to be some kind of HP branded device that's got some kind of clever.
The light field display that's going to have enabled you to see a three-dimensional appearing person on the other end that you're talking with. That sounds curious.
Looks like all it's got Deloitte do a lingo and Salesforce using it. Although I thought do a lingo was getting rid of all of their normal employees and replacing them with AI anyway. So quite what they'll be using that for.
So, so they'll have Jim and I talking to, you know,
perplexities UI in a joint 3D space.
Maybe.
Kind of like the little one we have before it was Alexa and something else chatting with one another back and forth. Yeah, that's right.
Siri. Yeah.
And of course, we're gonna get a Gemini button directly in Chrome that's just gonna like summarize everything that we're looking at So we never have to read in detail anymore
Hey, maybe we won't have to do any ads then, except for the fact that they're trying to figure out how to inject ads into AI results nowadays.
Well, the Verge picks out 15 things.
Go have a look through their story,
if you want to see kind of get the headlines and you haven't followed Google I.A. this week.
The other big news story on the other side of the big tech space was
Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Johnny Ive joining forces.
So OpenAI is buying Johnny Ive's startup that was building some kind of hardware.
Otherwise, no, nothing.
As far as I can tell from this story, right?
Yeah, well, it was a Wall Street Journal exclusive.
So therefore, you know, it was a lot of nothing as yet because there is nothing to be sold yet.
So this couples nicely with all of the other AI device conversations and successes and less than successes that we've seen.
They does talk about the humane AI pin.
It does talk about some other things.
So we'll all be waiting with Bated Breath to find out What is the A?
The I hardware that will make in fact a big difference.
I believe though that they also specified that
It's a completely new form factor that's never been seen before, which means it won't be a phone It won't be a pet the speaker. It won't be glasses. It won't be a pen. They won't be a watch
Yeah, now we've seen that before.
What are we left with in
Brain implant
Brain implant or Maybe a towing I'm I'm thinking, you know, we have the the smart rings. Maybe a towing would be an approach to this
Not an AI brain blan
Yeah No's ring knows ring. It's an earring. That's it. It'll be an earring
I'll be like the witch, so that way when you wiggle your nose, you can conjure things into being.
Maybe
Yeah
It's a it's very mysterious, but some people are very excited about it
Yeah, I did the big thing that I've heard this week
there was Bloomberg, Mark Gurman posted about this somewhere and I don't remember where I saw it. But the presentation of them coming together is supposed to, is being pitched as Johnny Ives design chops with Sam Alton's product chops. And so this is once again the dream team of jobs.
And so whatever it's going to come out, it's going to be great, trust us, so we'll see.
Software and hardware baby.
Well see, 100 million though, that's a big number.
I've just... I've just noticed something I'm just going to throw in here. We are moving forward,
but at the same time I'm just going to mention that whilst I've got my notebook LM tabs still open here
and looking disappointingly, disappointingly at the fact that it couldn't answer the question I asked.
When I went to check my settings, Michael, you suggested maybe I was locked down somehow.
Yep. Yes.
Under the settings menu, there is a link to Discord and you click on Discord and it indeed opens
a link to take you into a Discord server, which is baffling to me because this is Google. Anyway,
Yeah
Yeah.
moving along, moving right along. Let's talk about... let's talk about stuff that got Michael grow excited so that he can start doing with his vision pro.
Move very long
Moving along to new devices.
Yeah.
So there's been all this talk about, nobody knows what to do with the thing.
It was too expensive, blah, blah, who cares.
Right?
I saw this yesterday and it also showed up on one of the
a really unique way this one guy is using his vision pro.
Now, what he does is he installs ethernet, network settings and configurations in people's houses.
And if you don't have that context and you just watch this video as some of us did before the show, you're like,
what the hell is this guy doing?
He's just, you know, putting down stuff and shoving it
as he's walking around his house with his vision pro on.
Like, yeah, but traffic cones and Lego minifigs.
Yes, and Darth Vader's and Iron Man's and Coke cans or whatever.
But what this guy does is I had never thought of this and I thought it was genius.
He's actually using this as he's looking for placement of hardware to be installed within the house, access points,
So, he's taking U.S.
D.Z.
Files.
enlarging them and shoving them either down through the floor or up through the ceiling or through the walls so that when he gets to that other location, either above or below him or in crawl spaces,
he can see points that are appropriate to identify what's the best place to put this access point.
What's the best place to drop this line, etc.
And I thought this was brilliant.
What a cool use case.
It actually, watching it and on having that context, I didn't have the sound on us, you're alluded to that does make a lot of sense and yeah, you simply can't, you know, you have to be sort of tapping between walls to figure out where or marking things and measuring things exactly and working out where things go.
So that whole tethering of objects independently in space with that you have access to with the Vision Pro was quite...
Yeah
clever. We'd still be better though, don't you think if we didn't have to have the big bulky headset, or sleep headset, depending on whether you've got a meta quest or an Apple Vision Pro and it all just lived on your eyeball.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've talked about that once or twice before, haven't we?
Yeah, it would
So living on your eyeball, yeah, yeah, it's by this particularly, but this was...
Couple of times yes, and this is another story about things living on your eyeballs from the Guardian
Oh, yeah, spiders.
This is a story from the Guardian about some researchers in China who have come up with some contact lenses that apparently can enable whereas to see infrared light parts of the electromagnetic spectrum there with infrared and then not needing any power supply, and you'll be able to see infrared as well as the regular color spectrum.
And you really are much broader range of vision, opportunity, which if this works, you know, that could be quite an uninteresting set of super skills, depending on your use case.
Yeah. I thought this was brilliant. I at MOGFEST some years back, I was on one of their tracks where they did a science track and they were doing about extra sensory skills with brain implants,
[cough]
phantom limbs, syndromes, etc. And they talked about how well our brain is at adapting to new inputs.
And you know, having that overlay all the time via these these contact lenses,
of being able to see in infrared, it's just fascinating to see what that would do. Because your brain will adapt to that and figure it out pretty quickly.
Well, why stop there, there are other non-visible electromagnetic spectrum that if you kind of went further, could you see through the wall?
Could you envision it without having to have that headset on?
Lots more to be done.
And the article I thought was really kind of cool here, too, that talked about you can actually see better and infrared if you closed your eyes, because your eyes are blocking out the visible light spectrum, which allowed the infrared to penetrate it a little
Great. But it would also be quite frustrating there if you want to sleep in it. You're closing your own eyes to... Well, right, exactly. But yeah, it depends on the context and how they're being used. I like the proposal that they could help people with colorblindness or a similar technique could help people with colorblindness if I sort of shifting the wavelengths.
Mm-hmm, what if you closed one eye?
bit.
So, then you'll be, uh...
[Laughter]
Well, the context, you just take them out. You're going to bed.
[Laughter]
So that sounds quite fascinating. We want to revisit a story that we hit at the end of last week's show, which was we just heard that day that Michael was going to spend all of his remaining
Oh, Aston Mart money.
wealth on a new Aston Martin to complete his Apple portfolio to get the car play ultra.
Yes. Well this is, yeah and you know it was all joking aside last week it was just kind of a high level ad that it's there and this is a an episode of Top Gear where they actually do a 20-minute deep dive on the vehicle. So for those who are interested take a look at the video it's really cool and there are now multiple car manufacturers who have actually publicly committed
to do.
this.
So you won't have to spend Aston Martin money.
If they figure out a way, and this has worked in cars in the past with their in current payment systems to incorporate physical controls, so like I think BMW and Mercedes have done this in the past where you've had some kind of dial on the centre console that you could turn,
physical buttons, yep.
like it was almost like a joystick that you could turn or push or press.
Yeah, that was BMW's goofy thing. What did they call that Michael?
Oh, I don't remember exactly.
Here's a big round thing
it worked pretty well for for navigation around like a screen and again it gave you that ability and in fact I read a story this week as well the yesterday I believe that that was talking about how you can switch on the assistive voice over tech in carplay to actually improve your experience with to get past the voice assistance problems with playing the right playlist and things like that you can actually use voice navigation to tell it specifically which album to pick in your
Yeah.
Yeah, but
your library and it works very well, so yeah.
Well, the one thing I really liked about the Lucid,
when I looked at that car a couple of years ago,
was it had both car play and duplicative physical buttons,
Yeah. That sounds useful as well. Yeah, yeah.
and switches, which I would rather have, right, you know?
Anyway, I know we're just about out of time,
Well, yeah, and we, yeah, we are allegedly a technology about gaming technology and play,
but there's a couple of game topics in here.
as well as business and all kinds of other stuff. It says so in another opening. So I feel like we should, we should definitely include this. Microsoft have added, well, so there was this announcement yesterday on the, the came, I picked up through the verge. It was made elsewhere as well.
It says so in our opening.
So I thought this was exciting because I've got Game Pass.
Reading more into it, it talks about sort of Atari and some of the other older devices that you're going to get access to here, even SNES in original PlayStation games.
It turns out to be the AntStream technology, which so AntStream already have like a streaming service to play a lot of these roles.
And this is just a segment of AntStream games that you'll be able to play for free through Game Pass.
I'm not complaining, I get Game Pass, I pay for Game Pass, I'm getting some free new retro games and I'm a retro game fan.
But yeah, I haven't had a chance to play with any of these, I could not play them using Xbox, game streaming, cloud gaming, while I was lying in bed last night because none of them support touch controls.
But there you go, disappointment. First of all, problems.
No, you can touch the keyboard back in the day.
The other one, other gaming story here was that games workshop did a big, I've had done a big celebration, announcing some new games coming out.
And I think it's called the skulls event or something like that. And as part of that, they released a free game, which is their bolt gun shooter, which is kind of like a retroish do-mish shooter.
I actually really enjoy bulk on the game on the Xbox.
But they've kind of crossed it with house of the dead, typing, house of the dead, and made a typing tutor where you can type along with your space marine take out the enemies which we sort of kind of fun.
Yeah, couldn't play it, so I'll wait for you review.
It's free, so.
Oh, okay, well I should get on that, I guess.
Let me, let me, let me go, let me go play some games and I'll get reviewing.
Well, there we go. Time is done!
Well, speaking of reviews, we could use yours. We could use your review over on your favorite podcatcher or hit us up on mastodon other than that. You know, tell your friends would love love to hear from you, we would love to hear from them, read us, subscribe, etc., etc.
Bye!
Absolutely. See ya!
Bye!
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you've been listening to games@work.biz, the podcast about gaming technology and play.
We are part of the blueberry podcasting network,
and we'd like to thank the band, Random Encounters for their song, Big Blue.
You can follow us at our website at games@work.biz.
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