Published 14 July 2025

e520 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AI advertising, still photo animation, anime agents, Pollen Robotics, Unity tokamak fusion reactor digital twin and a whole lot more.

Michael, Andy and Michael get things off to a fast start with an article all about AI advertising.  And how including AI inside does not correlate with positive impressions.  The Google Veo3 capability to turn still image prompts into short videos is next in focus.  The hero image for this episode was made using Veo3.  On deck next are the open source Reachy robots from Pollen Robotics newly available on Hugging Face, along with associated demo code and AI models.  Then, on Kickstarter, the co hosts consider an AI 3D character pod.  The Dipal D1 on Kickstarter trumpets itself as the “world’s first curved 3D AI Character Pod”.  The intrepid Games at Work team digs up the Gatebox example from 2017 and the associated episodes shared in the links below.  This even includes a discussion from 2018 about “cross-dimensional” human-AI agent marriages, which foreshadows the game “Date Everything” from the Wired article. 

The next article is absolutely right in the wheelhouse for Games At Work:  South Korean scientists used Unity to create a digital twin of a toroidal fusion reactor.  And using the game engine’s physics engine, these scientists may have unlocked how to unleash fusion energy.

Rounding out this episode is the upcoming LEGO launch of a new Arcade Machine.  This fun kit has a number of cool easter eggs in it, and the team’s looking forward to building it.

What is your impression on “AI inside” advertising?  How do you think game engines may be used to further science (weird or otherwise)?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @[email protected] (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.

Futurism article: Something Hilarious Happens When Potential Customers See That a Product Has AI Features

Terrence Eden’s blog post: Gadget Review: Thermal Imaging Camera – Topdon TC004 Mini

Axios article: Google AI’s new trick: Turn any image into a brief video

Google’s Veo3 

TechCrunch article: Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots

Hugging Face blog post: Reachy Mini – The Open-Source Robot for Today’s and Tomorrow’s AI Builders

Hugging Face Reachy Mini Spaces

Pollen Robotics Reachy Mini

Wall-E Eve (LEGO version, of course!)

Pollen Robotics Reachy 2

Wikipedia entry: Alien: Romulus (with face hugger poster – not as bad as spiders, but close!)

Kickstarter: Dipal D1 – World’s First Curved Screen 3D AI Character Pod

Games at Work e159: Virtually Secure (for initial Gatebox discussion)

Games at Work e218: Virtually Married (for “cross-dimensional” human-AI nuptials)

Popular Mechanics article:  A Video Game Engine Just Broke a Huge Barrier for Nuclear Fusion. This Could Be the Key to Unlimited Power.

Computer Physics Communication volume 309, April 2025: Development of novel collision detection algorithms for the estimation of fast ion losses in tokamak fusion device

Unity

Wired article: A Game Called Date Everything Literally Lets You Date Everything—Except People

Date Everything

I integrated my Pixels dice with Home Assistant!

If you have Home Assistant with Bluetooth support, you can install my HACS component too: https://github.com/jaxzin/gamewithpixels-ha

The Verge article: Appeals court strikes down ‘click-to-cancel’ rule

The Verge article: Lego’s latest buildable arcade machine is packed full of fun hidden details

LEGO Arcade Machine 40805

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

Michael Martine