e495 — Personal Planetarium

Games At Work dot Biz

Photo by Michael Martine, Morehead Planetarium Sundial, Chapel Hill Sept 2019

Published 30 December 2024

e494 with Michael and Michael on personal planetariums, digital doppelgängers, agentic AI acceleration, and a whole lot more!

Michael and Michael start this episode off with a full dome sized bang, Sandwich Vision’s Theater app. In addition to replicating famous theater spaces via Apple Vision Pro, Theater 2.0 also introduces a planetarium experience. Michael R makes a North Carolina tie to the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill. Michael M is reminded how the planetarium VR experience has surfaced on the podcast before. See the link in the show notes to e177 from 2017 for one such example.

The team calls back to last week’s episode, dealing with AI discovering the rules to games thousands of years old with a new story from Nature. This article explores the use of AI in translating animal communications from birds, whales, elephants and more, as well as identifying unique animals. Additional use case for AI and GenAI include Apple’s Image Wand in iOS & iPadOS 18.2, a physics engine called Genesis, and creating a meeting doppelgänger via HeyGen. The idea of sending an agentic version of yourself to a meeting sparks a lively discussion about responsible AI and what this bodes for the differentiation that the human may bring. The trustworthiness (truthiness?) of chatbot responses surfaces via a pair of stories where people say “I asked ChatGPT …” or how the chatbot itself tends to follow mechanics similar to how mentalists interact with their audience.

Wrapping things up for the episode, Michael and Michael anticipate the upcoming CES with a couple of hardware stories: a supremely expensive transparent television and a MagSafe gaming controller.

If you could talk with the animals, what would you say? What new consumer electronics do you hope to see from CES 2025? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @[e-mail] (our home for now) and let us know!

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

A VRy Personal Planetarium

9 to 5 Mac article: Apple Vision Pro just got a planetarium, and it’s friggin’ awesome

Sandwich Vision‘s Theater: Cinema & Events app for Apple Vision Pro

IMAX app for iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro

Reef Distribution

Morehead Planetarium and Science Center

Games at Work e177: What could possibly go wrong?

Adler Planetarium

AI

Nature article: AI decodes the calls of the wild

IMDb: Dr. Dolittle, 1967

CNet article: Conjure Drawings From Sketches Using Image Wand in Apple Intelligence on Your iPhone or iPad

GitHub: Genesis: A Generative and Universal Physics Engine for Robotics and Beyond

Globe and Mail article: I created an AI avatar of myself to go to Zoom meetings

HeyGen

The Verge article: Here’s a new way to lose an argument online: the appeal to AI

SoftwareCrisis.dev article: The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

National Geographic article: How technology is reshaping religion

Marie Kondo – KonMari

Browsing the past, and the future (CES 2025)

Tom’s Hardware article: Relive surfing the original internet with new emulator — 34 years later, WorldWideWeb app commemorates the first web browser

LG product page: 77 Inch Class LG SIGNATURE OLED T: World’s first Transparent 4K Smart TV 2024 with True Wireless Video & Audio Transfer

NotebookCheck article: M-Con: New MagSafe gaming controller for smartphones revealed before CES 2025 with Hall effect joysticks and pocketable design

Wikipedia article: Danger Hiptop

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine