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

77 Future Now podcast - Live from Maui with Richard Cray, Man of la Mancha, Greg Panos with the latest in AI music and Avatars, Ed Ellsworth and the Maui Fires, Jerry Isdale on Island tech and the arts

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This week we broadcast from Maui with a wonderful selection of friends who clue us in to what’s happening in this Hawaiian paradise.  It’s been a year since the horrible Lahaina fires and recovery has been slow and agonizing to many.  Ed Ellsworth gives us an update on that situation.  To help recover the Aloha spirit of the island, the Maui Arts and Cultural Center in partnership with The Makana Aloha Foundation and County of Maui Office of Economic Development, sponsored a professional production of the famous Broadway play, Man of la Mancha, starring former Broadway actor/singer Richard Cray, and  Hawaii music legend,  Amy Hānaialiʻi Gilliom.  Richard is a big fan of our podcast and we interview him about his epic role of Don Quixote, and the play’s ability to lift the spirits of all who see it.  His partner, Greg Panos, shares with us some of the innovations he sees in the use of virtual and augmented reality and AI music and visuals in enhancing a production’s impact.  

Richard Cray and Amy Hānaialiʻi Gilliom

Maui maker faire creator Jerry Isdale joins us to share info on Maui arts and tech projects currently underway, his latest works involving dancers, and an update on the formidable looking high tech installations at the top of the local volcano, Haleakalā.  Enjoy!

L-R The Futures, Ed Ellsworth, Bobby Wilder, and Richard Cray

Future News - Latest Asteroid Impact, Ceres Getting a Closeup, Distracted Driving via Watch, Augmented World Expo Review

Listen Now to Future News 6.05.2018

Certainly for us the most exciting thing this week was attending the Augmented World Expo 2018 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley.  To help us cover this amazing conference, we have in the studio Greg Panos and Richard Cray, no strangers to the augmented and virtual worlds as you have heard from their previous reports. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the virtualization of Walt Disney’s personal office and the VR exhibit, “Where Thoughts Go.” Enjoy!

One of the more profound exhibits at AWE 2018 photo by Richard Cray

Mrs. Future tangles with Elon Musk detractor, Chinese moon probe examined, guests Richard Cray and Greg Panos on virtual collaborative art and augmented reality.

Listen Now to Dr. Future Show 12.17.13

A lively show this week, starting off early on Ethan’s show, with a brief debate between Sun (Mrs. Future) and talk show host Ethan Bearman, regarding Ethan’s latest article,  ”Why Elon Musk is a Poor Person’s Worst Nightmare.”

The conversation continues into our show, followed by our guests Richard Cray and Greg Panos in the studio for both segments. Fortunately, besides their areas of expertise, our esteemed guests are good comprehensive generalists on all things future, fitting well with our discussion of current future topics.

Two of our biggest fans of the show, Greg and Richard are no strangers to future think, with Greg being one of the earliest researchers in Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Richard as a professional singer exploring many high tech artistic opportunities.  We discuss and play, for example, Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir presentations, with thousands of singers participating from around the planet. 

This pic of Greg and Richard was taken immediately after the show, during a most spectacular sunset.