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!

Interview - Media Pioneer Michael Gosney on the Renaissance of Digital Multimedia

Listen Now to Michael Gosney

Before there was the Internet there were Mac SE’s, Amigas, Atari’s, and Mac II microcomputers.  They were revolutionizing the industries of book and magazine publication, photography, graphic arts, and music.  

To cover this revolution there was Verbum Magazine, founded by Michael Gosney, who later hosted the popular Digital Be-in parties, following the ever popular MacWorld Exhibition at Moscone Center in San Francisco.  

On today’s show Michael brings us back to these formative times, just before the rise of the internet and the whirlwind of evolution that happened then.  It was in these early times, the pre-Cambrian era of microcomputers, that today’s digital world was born, with artists collaborating, playing with techies and geeks to make it all happen Join us as we relive these magical times, their connection with the psychedelic 60’s, and setting the stage for today’s hyperlinked mobile world.

Guest - Michael Gosney

Listen Now to Michael Gosney

Michael Gosney is a veteran “new edge” media producer and impresario whose productions and events have defined the emergent integrative culture for 25 years – from holistic health to deep ecology to small press publishing to new science to desktop publishing and multimedia to eco-cities to cyberculture to electronic music to the “transmodern tribalism” evolving in festival culture, intentional communities and new social and economic networks across the planet.