027 WTFuture Interview - Greg Panos & Richard Cray - Pioneers in the Virtual Multiverse

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This week we take you on a glorious, high-voltage trip through our very own  multiverse ! Enjoy the whole show, or pick a clip from this episode’s playlist.

We sit down with long-time cyber-pioneers Greg Panos and Richard Cray to reminisce about the wild, wild west of early multimedia.. Not just 8mm, we’re talking ancient Waldo facial motion capture contraptions glued onto your cheeks like mechanical leeches to drive giant Silicon Graphics workstations, and crashing a surreal 1993 SIGGRAPH party at the Nixon Museum and Birthplace, sponsored by Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic! It’s a hyper-energetic reunion tracing the hysterical evolution from retro online virtual reality worlds like The Palace and Active Worlds right up to today’s bleeding-edge world-crafting tools, such as Genie, whole 3D  world building, built from  simply prompts..

And hold onto your earbuds, because we now jump straight into full-blown sci-fi reality overdrive! Greg demonstrates real-time face-swapping with AI tools like Decart Lucy 2.5, instantly turning a regular webcam into a Hollywood VFX studio where you can magically transform yourself into Albert Einstein with rubber duckies in a bathtub! Gregory is happy to demo this to us in realtime on the show, clearly showing some serious ‘writing on the wall’ when it comes to the future of online interactions!

We next zoom through an immersive VR theater,  LA’s new futuristic DataLand museum, complete with biometric wristbands and scent collars, allowing you to smell the anura of the wild Amazon..  Greg shares his  dream of building digital twin avatars so your stories can live on for your great-great-grand-nieces! Between jokes about robot girlfriends, multiverse quantum doorways, and doing jigsaw puzzles to reclaim human sanity, it’s a funny, brilliant reminder that even with super-intelligent machines, soulful human  connections are the gold standard for accepting any future world that may come our way.  Enjoy!

134 Future Now Show - Richard Cray on Starship 11, Al's Drone Disaster, 3I/ATLAS comet update, Quantum stocks soar, Bitcoin flash dives, Massive fresh water aquifer under Atlantic, Replay celebrity cloning,Veo 3, Sora 2, and now Imagine, Greg Panos on virtualizing his Mother.

Listen to 134 Future Now Show

Happy birthday to Al today, aka Dr. Future! We are an acquired taste, but once acquired, we are as tasty as Guinness! This week Richard Cray discusses with us the latest with Space X’s humongus Star Ship, and it’s ground-breaking one hour flight from Texas to the Indian Ocean. Dr. Future shares his tale of losing a drone to a giant redwood in Silicon Valley. Bobby Wilder updates us on his Hawaiian adventures, and the Bitcoin flash dive, Greg Panos looks at the rise of quantum stocks and suggests we explore the free AI software, Replay AI, for cloning voices of friends, family and celebrities. Our AI, Ara, introduces a new text to video tool, IMAGINE, and Dr. F demos his use of Replay, with his Rodney Dangerfield personification, and shares a very cleverly done personalized version of the song, FAME, by Idina Menzel. Enjoy! 

Starship 11 in action

19 Future Now Show - Psyche Mission is On, Greg Panos & Richard Cray on Augmented World Expo 2023 and our collective take on the Apple Vision Pro!

Listen to Future Now 6.06.2023 XR

The virtual and augmented worlds got a double boost this week, with the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara and the revealing of the Apple Vision Pro headset. Apple’s vision of the XR future is markedly different from the leader in that space, Meta, with a focus more on augmented than virtual reality and higher end resolution and graphics, amongst many other things.  To help evaluate the latest and greatest in these worlds, we have in studio, Greg Panos, a pioneer o augmented and virtual reality, Richard Cray, an accomplished vr/ar performance artist, Taylor Barcroft, our Future Now Apple correspondent, and Bobby Wilder our science correspondent.  We think you’ll really appreciate a lttle ditty about Apple’s new headset we created with a little help from Richard’s singing and Greg’s prompting of Perplexity.ai.  Enjoy!

L-R Richard Cray, Allan Lundell, Sun Lundell, Gregory Panos

Future Now 07 - The nearby Mae West Point, PI Day Humor, Steve Follmer on the new weight loss/end obesity drugs, Greg Panos on the latest creative AI tools, Richard Cray Sings for an AI experiment

Listen Now to Future Now Show 07 3.14.2022

While we were recording this week’s show, the wind and rain were howling outside, thousands locally were without power and bandwidth, and we were concerned about large trees falling on our house.  Fortunately, we were able to complete the show without incident, and what a show it is! 

We take a closer look at the mysterious Mae West point, explore the strangeness of Boulder Creek, Steve Follmer, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, shares his experiences with a class of weight loss drugs known as semaglutides, which are taking the world by storm. 

And on the creative front, Greg Panos describes several new AI-powered tools that give us visual and audio super powers, i.e. creating amazing images in a few seconds from a simple textual description, like “create a monkey in a space suit meditating on the shri yantra.” Though is cause to fear AI, there is even more cause to celebrate how AI can enhance our creative expression. Enjoy!

AI generated image from the text: “a monkey in a space suit meditating on the shri yantra”

Future News and Views - Congrats to Space-X, Starship Explosion, New Solar Activity, Monica on City Council Meeting, Greg Panos on AWE 2020 XR Expo,Beyond Zoom tools, HP VR, Dan Dan on Dr. Zacks on the Microbiome

Listen Now to Future News 6.2.20

A full show today, with news, both local and global.  A big congrats to Space-X and their successful ferrying of humans to the ISS, just wow! Too bad about the Starship explosion, though it was half expected. Thanks to Monica McGuire for her report on our Santa Cruz City Council meeting, including plans for our slow re-opening of businesses locally.  

And a special report from Greg Panos on Augmented World Expo 2020, covering such topics as new VR/AR hardware, social spaces like Alt Space, spatial io, and Alt Space. And good to hear from Shane, an Australian listener who loves our show and bringing our attention to Dr. Douglas Gentile, a renowned media psychologist at Iowa State University.

Dr. Dan Beilin checks in with an update on Covid, with some good conversations between him, us and Bobby Wilder, our science journalist co-host. We all got so engaged with our discussion about Dr. Zack’s work with the microbiome, we forgot it was the end of the show! Enjoy..