Keiichi Matsuda is one of the deepest thinkers in the field of XR. He is trained as an architect, and he's currently the director of Liquid City, a small design studio based in London that is engaged developing cutting-edge AR applications and creating speculative design film and written essays that give us a sneak peak at the future of immersive and spatial computing technologies. Matsuda created one of the most influence cautionary tales of augmented reality called HYPER-REALITY in 2016, which I did a deep dive with him back in 2018 in episode #639. He's currently working with Niantic on some more speculative film essays, which should be launching soon.

Matsuda was at AWE 2023 showing off a couple of recent projects including an AI agent named Wol in collaboration with Niantic's 8th Wall, that has the intention to explore the idea of personalized education. He was also showing off his really cool AR game called Overbeast, which is a highly-original and unique social AR game that combines farming with giant boss battles of AR beasts that fill the entire sky. We had a chance to unpack all of his latest projects, and do a deep dive into how they used inworld.ai to create Wol that has mix of magical glue of large language model technology that keeps interactions novel, fresh, but also bounded by the customized set of knowledge that you enter. I'll be diving in a bit deeper into inworld.ai in the next episode.

Also be sure to check out Matsuda's provocative essay on KamiOS that's uses pagan animism as a metaphor to describe how AI + XR will be infusing our lives. "KamiOS channels the spirit world using AR. When you put on your headset, you will be introduced to many different gods who will guide you through your virtual and physical life. Gods of navigation, communication, commerce. Gods who teach you, gods who learn from you. Gods who make their home in particular objects or places, and gods who accompany you on your journey."

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Music: Fatality