Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash

Michael and Michael are left to their own devices to explore several stories featuring AR and AI — with games, drones and literature all making an appearance in this week’s episode.  

Andy’s copy of Mario Kart Live was just delivered, and judging from the initial response to the game, it is completely understandable that this is where he wanted to spend his time!  What a tremendous augmented reality implementation to transform your own home into a racetrack, and experience it through the camera mounted on the race car and viewed on your Nintendo Switch.  In another AR game example, Patched Reality’s game Epic Marble Run makes use of the iPad Pro (and just announced iPhone 12 Pro Max) LiDAR sensor to blend the world around you with the game’s task of getting the marble from start to finish.

But wait, there’s more AR: the US Army is testing augmented reality goggles for canine units, which spark a discussion between the co-hosts on how the dog’s handler could use the goggles to paint certain targets which the dog could investigate more closely.  This story is followed by the SiteAware example of using drones to quickly and easily evaluate construction project progress in conjunction with building an digital twin powered by artificial intelligence.  

The cohosts then get a little more philosophical while discussing an article about StoryFile, an way to allow for natural conversations between people — the person who was recorded answering questions, and the viewer who is asking questions that are responded to by the person who was recorded.  This reminds Michael and Michael of some earlier conversations on how recordings could be used to create a semblance of immortality, or at least how an artificial intelligence agent might use the corpus to determine how someone would have responded to a question.  One conversation on this topic happened back in 2012 on episode 26 of the podcast.  Michael R brings up Neil Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age which has examples of how a reader can interact with recorded and live other people.  Amazing how aspects of what Neil imagined in 2000 has become commonplace with today’s tablets and e-readers.

Following on the fantastically cool discussion with Mark last week, Michael and Michael explore some new ways to think about the code that goes into games, and how some of the delivered code is never activated because the conditions to execute that code are never triggered.  Which then requires one to ask the question, if code to make a sound never executes, does it really make a sound?  OK, so maybe that’s not the question, but still, it’s intriguing to know that there are visuals, dialog and gameplay that never saw the light of day that could be uncovered, restored and shared.  

Wrapping up this week’s episode, Michael and Michael share some of their favorite games that they would like to see a similar source code treatment, and links to those are listed below.  “Elf needs food badly!”  What games would you want to see the source code for?

Selected Links

Cnet article: Mario Kart Live turned my son into a terrifying monster — https://www.cnet.com/news/mario-kart-live-turned-my-son-into-a-terrifying-monster/