[Music]
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.
This is episode 545, Cyberpunk, Pot Holes.
[upbeat music]
Hello and welcome again to Games at Work.biz, your weekly technology podcast,
my name is Andy Piper and with me this week is one of my good friends called Michael Mr. Michael Rowe, how are you Michael?
Andy, I am just peachy keen, happy fine, and I'm looking over your right shoulder and loving the two mastodon plushies.
Yup, I have a stack of Macedons and Macedon related things on my shelves, which is also great content for an audio podcast So people know about that
Yes. I was following a two yesterday on, I guess, there was an impromptu made beanie,
Oh yeah, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
knit cap, and there was a poll, and I said I would buy one of those if the shipping to the US wasn't astronomically insane, which is why I didn't get that plushy either.
Yeah, the shipping is the big. Yeah, the shipping is a big challenge at the moment and that's worldwide as well because, you know, even in the UK, shipping from Europe is a problem,
but we're doing our best with things. It's, it's just a small way to keep a little bit of income coming in. It's not a, certainly not going to cover all of our costs for the merchandise,
but it's a way to show a bit of support as well. So yeah. But we've got some ideas.
- No, not at all.
Yep.
Cool, so what do we wanna talk about today?
What do we want to talk about today? Well, we've got a few things in the one, the first thing I is something I found just today before we started recording, which is some new Kickstarter
for these new electronic gauntlets. And the demo that they're showing on Hackster is, I think,
Yes? Yes.
could be the initial version of these comes with this kind of, so they're gone as they sit on top of your forearm. They've got some kind of metallic owie.
So with the screen and some buttons and it's got some kind of charging port and the thing that they demonstrate in the video and attached to the Hackster article is a drone that you can launch from your arm, which looks kind of fun, a small drone. But the interesting thing is that they are talking about this as a modular system so that users in the community can develop
their own modules. The gauntlets themselves have some level of smart features, health and fitness tracking and some features, enabling phone connections so you can get your notifications or whatever,
but the idea being that you could plug on additional functionality and looks kind of cool.
Yeah, yeah, I was I was watching the Kickstarter video
for it and
You know you mentioned they they hook on to your forearms and I was like yep, that's what God let's do
And I
I was imagining use cases where it would be convenient to have
more than
a watch, right? But was not so bulky or evasive or, I don't even know what the right word is,
where this would be convenient, right? Because while the drone looked cool, yeah no. Now if it or a little tiny drone that fits somewhere inside the gauntlet and you pressed a button or set a command and it popped out of the gauntlet and unfolded in there as it's falling to the ground and took off.
It kind of unfold you yeah
Now that would be kind of cool cyberpunky.
Well what it looked like looking at the at the demo video is as part of the Kickstarter or part of the offering when it's available they're going to have some pre-shaped magnets that you can stick on things and there's a flat around flat.
So that's where the drone hooks up because there's a big enough space for a magnet that might be strong enough to hold even this small drone as well as to the right and the left of the screen that's in the center of the gauntlet.
There are these magnetic connectors where you attach the modules.
And so, uh, the, uh,
the big bulky ones are the ones that I wonder how, how often would you do this? If you're gonna do that, wouldn't you want two gauntlets then one on each arm? So you have, you know, access to some of the other stuff because the big
drone that they show. And yes, big, what I mean by big is maybe like four inches. So small.
Is probably going to overlap some of the other modules that you've plugged in and definitely going to overlap the display that's built in. But yeah, yeah.
Conceptually, absolutely agree. This looks fun, cool. Get this. And do you remember, gosh, I guess now it would be five years ago, the face mask that had the microphones in it and the speakers that was designed around COVID time that you could write, had the air filters, have one of those on with these gauntlets,
Oh yeah, yeah, but didn't that, but didn't that get, that didn't that get proven to be useless and everybody had to be refunded or something, there were not many of them sold, something like that.
Yeah. I mean, they finally shipped it almost a year. They shipped it like really late. It showed up at CES, I think, right around or shortly after CES, right when COVID started happening.
And then I think it shipped like in November or later. And I remember, oh, God, who was it?
It wasn't, I'm totally going blank on her name. Yeah.
There's one of the influences, right?
The enclosure was taking it on a plane. I'm totally going blank on her. Thank you, Felicia Day, who I've met and talked to and she's very nice. But I think it was a Felicia Day was they have the person who showed it. I think she may have shown one too. Anyway,
Mm-hmm.
doesn't really matter. Yes, that mask, these gauntlets, maybe those shoes that that Michael talked about a couple of weeks ago from Nike that accelerates.
You're speed and you're halfway through becoming a mess.
Well, if you scroll down the kickstarter page, they go into the details of the history of the team and the product, and the patent goes back to November 2024.
After they failed to get an exoskeleton startup off the ground over the course of 2023, and they've now come up with this thing.
so it's called the Titan. I'm probably, I'm almost certain I went
be investing in this particular Kickstarter, but it looks interesting and fun and I'm curious to see what happens.
Yeah, they've, they've, they've, as of time of our recording, uh, they have 14 left in their super early bird option and 25 left in the early bird option and 10 in the kickstart.
So it's not got much of an uptick.
I mean, there's a lot of people in the elite super early bird, uh, relatively speaking.
But yeah.
Well, that's because they're pledging what they're pledging $599 to save $50 on the estimated retail of $650.
And then if you add your Apple Vision Pro on your head, then that gives you your $4,000, you know, nice, nice round numbers.
- Yeah.
- Oh yeah, that with the mask, these and the feet.
- Yeah.
- Well, no, no, that's only if you've got the base actual vision problem.
Right, right, right, right. Talking of Apple Vision Pro.
[laughing]
Some of us do not have the base one.
[laughing]
Apple and VR and Virtual Reality Augmented Reality. We've spoken previously about the pivot last week about two different types of wearables that Apple may be making.
And there's another story this week on via 9 to 5 Mac about their smart glasses that allegedly are coming.
There's another remote which we haven't got a link for, which is the next week.
So as the podcast comes out on Monday, Apple will be launching a series of new devices
probably including touch screen max and colorful laptops but, well, they did you see the little video clip with the Apple logo and the hand manipulating the Apple logo, we'll see, we'll see, there's rumors, there's rumors, it's another rumor time, it's always rumors
They're not going to launch the touchscreen Mac next week. That's going to be September.
Yeah. Yeah. It's always room. But what's interesting about this is we don't tend to talk about acquisitions very often, but Apple recently acquired a company called QAI
about this. If it works, half as well as the hype of the press announcements of the acquisition.
Okay. Is a technology hire or acquisition, an aqua hire, whatever you want to call it, that uses
nonverbal speech and understands it and can use it in a setting like this. So if you can imagine
kind of whispering to yourself with no sound whatsoever, you know, hey, dingus, turn on the lights
and you're wearing these glasses and they have the right sensors or maybe it's in the air pods or whatever. And then you can have interactions without looking like the crazy person sitting there,
Well, I do do that with the AirPods where you can do the shake head or not head interaction if you get a notification.
you know, vibe coding in their glasses or something.
Yeah, this is spoken words. That's the thing
Yeah, I see that.
that I find really interesting about this one, because I wouldn't mind having the UI elements of the vision pro in a much lighter, lower powered device, right? So glasses, glasses would be nice with that.
I'm almost constantly in AirPods so that I can focus and do other things, right?
So if I could get that with the visual overlays of some of the content of vision pro, but in fact...
some glasses and then the ability to not sound like a crazy person talking to myself out loud, I think this is a kind of a neat, neat potential part for upcoming, quote unquote, Apple glasses.
Well, let's assume that I switched to Android in order to install this new app which enables you to discover using Bluetooth and be warned if somebody wearing smart glasses is near you,
then were you enit wearing those glasses that you've just described and I was near you.
My Android phone would tell me Michael's wearing those glasses and I wouldn't come near you.
Yes, but let's be honest, if it was Apple, it'd be so branded, it'd be like a giant.
[laughing]
And instead of the tape on the bridge of your glasses, it would be an apple.
- That's probably true.
But yeah, I actually found that article interesting too.
As London is supposed to be the most filmed surveilled city on the planet,
New York is starting.
to make a run for that money, right?
This is interesting, because this came up recently in conversation at home about the Flock Ring hook up and the outrage, the uproar that happened after the Super Bowl commercial about the Find the Dog in the neighborhood and then Ring have backed away from this partnership with Flock because of, I believe,
I have a high bar of privacy that I want.
Flocks saying well, it's not just that
believe that wish amendment is, which amendment is, is it?
the fourth amendment, the, the right to privacy, right? And, right. But it's, but it's, but it's to do with,
Fourth
Well, there is no right to privacy amendment
Right that the Supreme Court said there's a right to privacy the fourth is unreasonable search and seizure seizure
So which is equated to privacy because that means you can't search my stuff if I don't give you permission
right, right. So it's to do with, yeah, there's interpretations of that that basically give you more permissions around, you know, your home and surroundings as according to the member, which is stuff that I've learned about the American Constitution and how it gets interpreted or is set up. So, and we were talking about the fact, as you say, that in the UK, you do have this, and it's not necessary.
It's probably something that we think about a lot, but there is a lot of public use of closed-circuit television cameras.
So, some of the things that were being described in terms of what the flock and ring combination might be enabling is stuff that is potentially already possible in the UK.
How commonly it's used, I can't comment on, but it is an interesting cultural difference between the ways that we think about what's
society and with the technology around us. Yeah.
- Yeah, well, what, so there was a show,
gosh, eight, 10 years ago maybe called humans.
And the very first episode has these people breaking into some building and they're wearing these necklaces and the necklaces are IR in May.
Mm-hmm
So you can't see their faces, and I keep thinking with, you know, you might have smart glasses near me.
Mm-hmm
That's one thing, right? You have the meta glasses, right? The ray bands.
And you had the little Oculus, the Oculus, what an Oculus, the Kickstarter version basically.
Yeah. Yeah.
And one is knowing that you have glasses that could film that I find more interesting would be our filming, right?
And then have, you know, my gauntlets say, "Hey, you're filming, immediately turn on a Bluetooth sensor on a necklace on my neck and hit the IR blaster so that you can't see me."
back to the Cyberpunk, how the future society is going to deal with all of this.
Yes, because yeah.
Well, I mean, forgetting future society, let's all just be muppets.
Current society.
Yes, and did you get to watch the recent Muppet Show episode?
No, it's on our backlog list of things that we keep meaning to go and watch on on there
It was a, it was a Muppet Show episode period the end.
My picture Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we watched a couple of skits from it particularly musical ones, but I haven't seen the full thing
Quite well done, etc.
However, yeah.
Well, what's interesting, I saw a tooth this week about a daily dot article
that evidently Disneyland had a ride called Muppet Vision in 3D or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
I never knew this.
I think I've been to many Disney places over the years of my life.
And what's interesting is, the Disney+ team has been approached by
has approached Brian Henson, I think, and asked to be able to make that ride, which is being shut down,
Mm-hmm.
and resurrected as a VR experience for people.
The assumption is this will be on the Vision Pro by default,
because the relationships between Disney and Apple, etc.
I remember reading something in the article that is this same type of things,
being approached on other different virtual reality rides for
the meta quest and other platforms, just VR platforms in general.
I would think that Disney would want to make this one also available
on other platforms which would not be a Vision Pro exclusive.
And having never seen it, but being a fan of them up, this will be in my queue as soon as it's available.
the muppets in VR for your headset or my headset coming soon potentially. That sounds terrifying to me, but I'm gonna have muppet chickens flocking me from all directions.
Yes, depends on which muppet it is, right?
Yes, I'm speaking of flock.
Yeah. Now you were particularly entertained by a little video that was posted on on this week that, uh,
I was, and you were not as entertained.
You kind of have to see it.
I don't know how well this is going to work again as a visual gag,
given that our podcast is in audio.
But let's see how you do.
Well, you want to definitely go to our show notes and click through to the master's on post and then watch the embedded video.
So, this is a... how to describe it.
Hmm. Yes. Mm-hmm.
So, it's a train on a track in a station and you hear the announcement that the train is being delayed to leaving the station.
Okay, and they open the doors to the train.
And you're like, "Well, what's delaying it?"
And suddenly, an exact replica of that train at about 1/10 scale,
maybe not that small, but pretty small, slides into view in the doors of the train.
And you hear another announcement that a tiny train has delayed the train in the station,
and it's doors open up, and there is another 1/10 scale of that 1/10 scale,
Tiny train.
And it does this multiple times. I find this hilarious because I'm a big fan of the tick and the tick if you're familiar or not familiar with the tick was a superhero and one of the one of the statements of one of the characters on the tick was I'm full of tinier men and to me this is full of tinier trains.
So my part in this is it is trying to describe to the audience the look of sheer glee and delight as Michael described exactly what was going on in this video to to us just then.
it's fun you've got to have fun every once in a while and this was fun
There's there's another post we've got here under our art section this week which is also a very visual one that is worth coming in and clicking through to it's from Jason cockers blog.
And he has cataloged a number of unusual views of the winter Olympics that have just finished in Italy and.
It is some quite beautiful photos using different techniques to create unique views of the games so for example there is curling taken using that miniature miniaturization technique tilt shift which gives you that kind of toy effect of.
Of the subject there's other things using vintage cameras at moat with multiple exposures there's things using.
The thermal imaging cameras as well showing which of course is quite striking given a winter games where you've got the extreme cold of the surrounding and then the extreme heat of the human competitors so.
It's really quite interesting and a different way of looking at the games.
I really enjoyed those. There were so many of them and there's an article that he clicks through that shows that the actual base articles from the Atlantic. Yeah. Very cool.
Right. A couple of more to round off the show. We've got a few things to talk about. One of them is our friend, the Mars rover and our friend, the Mars helicopter.
Our friends once more. So, listeners to the show will remember that we are into space and we have been following the the travails of NASA's mission to Mars in some detail. And the ingenuity helicopter shut down some time ago because it ran out of power or could
I think it had a little bit of damage as well. Yeah. So, there were a few things that it was only intended to last a couple of days when it went up as an experiment. It managed to do 72 missions and it was a long time that they managed to do things with it. But what they've actually managed to do now, and this is one of those mind-blowing things when you think about what has happened, that there are these machines, electronic machines that humans
I thought the propellers got damaged over time because of the sand and stuff
Yep
Months worth of time
managed to deliver to a far off planet elsewhere on our solar system and are still able to reuse them and do things with them. So, they've now managed to deliver any workload to the helicopter base station, which essentially acts as a remote GPS for the rover because the rover kept losing track of itself because it didn't have GPS.
And so it would, it would kind of, you know,
carry on trundling along and then estimating how, well, where it was, but now it can communicate with the helicopter, which can actually detect because it has a much better processor, I think 100 times faster than the rover.
Actually like actors triangulation and help it to figure out, apparently the algorithm takes about two minutes to pinpoint the rover's location to within about 25 centimeters and.
reinforce the rover where it is. It's, it's really quite clever. It's just amazing stuff.
it's just crazy. It is. It's amazing. I can imagine the rover. It reminds you of an old Steve Martin phrase or way of speaking in his old comedy routines of "We're Am I?"
[laughs]
The rover is sitting there and the ground controls are going, "Bress your own Mars."
Well, luckily, the rover hasn't yet encountered the kinds of potholes that it might find on Earth.
Thank you.
I mean, it's got a much worse, in fact, to deal with that up on Mars, but on Earth, there's a company in the UK that's been reported this week in Bojini's report as being able to do some work around helping a local government,
the organisation in the UK, figure out when pothole's going to form.
It turns out, when I did a background reading on this,
that this has been happening for a couple of years.
This is an old bit of news that we're being re-reported.
I think there's some effort to apply,
the kind of AI that is being used with these vehicles in the UK to problems, infrastructure problems in the US, at least in the article.
This has evidently happened already.
I was surprised to read about it because it talks about this being an autonomous vehicle and in the UK, we're only just about to start enabling self-driving taxes and so on in metropolitan areas.
So I think it was a very early test of this kind of technology,
but yeah, potholes.
- Yeah, they're very cool, Paul's.
Fixing before they happen.
[laughs]
The final robotic link we have is somebody who manages to raise his own robot army which Michael you found typical for this space.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, so and and I think this is coming across like all the news is in the in the US this week I don't know how visible this one was in the UK
but so a geek Like like the rest of us decided that he just bought a new RoboVac and it
You know has IOT capabilities as communication killed capabilities So, you figured out, you know, how can I reverse engineer its control?
So, that I can control it with a PS5 controller.
Mm-hmm
So, I can vacuum my house.
Well, in typical IoT perspective, the developers of this device thought,
well, nobody would ever do anything to try to reverse engineer our command and control system.
And so, lo and behold, their back end was completely wide open.
and when he was controlling his own vacuum,
he was also controlling.
I mean, it's only a connected device that has the ability to map the inside of your house and tons of sensors on it.
Yeah, why not with a camera and see inside of your house
Why not?
Where's the camera? Yes.
So, this is one of those stories. Yeah, no surprise.
Well
And on that bombshell, that's the end of our links run through this week so We will be back here again next week talking through some some tech and links But do share anything you find interesting to us on
Macedon, games that work on the school biz, and otherwise we will see you.
[music]
Bye
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