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!

131 Future Now Show - 'Love, Al, Turkey, Seattle, and visionary architecture' with Minimalist Thaddeus Van Petten, 'Seeing Life as it is.." with Richard Cray, "Perfection is the enemy of the Good," with Greg Panos

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‘Love, Turkey, and visionary architecture’ with Minimalist Tadd Van Petten, ‘Seeing Life as it is..” with Richard Thaddeus Van PettenCray, “Perfection is the enemy of the Good,” with Greg Panos

I knew Thaddeus when he became a housemate of mine in the late 1980’s, 19 years old, raised in Santa Cruz, ready for whatever’s next, which included me..An inquistive, kind, and thoughtful person, I helped connect him with his mentor for many years, visionary architect, Eugene Tsui.  Tsui’s work embraces a profound understanding of the architecture of Nature, and many of Tsui’s buildings resemble works of Nature, like sea anemones.  Returing from an 8 year love affair in Turkey, he has been working as a finishing carpenter on the glorious new mansions of our tech bros, he shares with us his journey into the heart and soul of humanity.

In the second segment of today’s show we hang with our buddies Greg Panos and Richard Cray, exploring their latest adventures in singing, performing, being honored, and communicating with the AI’s privately on your personal machines. The last song of the show is from Richard’s performance in The Man from La Mancha, in Maui last year. And just somehow his performance perfectly meshes wtih Gregory’s seamlessly interwining the real with digital worlds. Enjoy!

Al, Sun, Greg, and Richard creating the Future Now Show

115 The Future Now Show - XR Explorer Club, Apollo Infinities, LV Bitcoin Conference Insights, Astrocyte Memory

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It appears, for us at least, that there is a resurgence of activity in the Virtual Reality space, specifically regarding the use of an app called, “VR Chat.”  An excellent place to connect with others and have ‘chats,’ it’s also a fine app for creating virtual worlds that can be visited and shared.  Armed with an invite from VR pioneer Greg Panos, we were in worlds for many hours this week, as part of a meetup of the “XR Explorer’s Club,” where we explored a couple of worlds together, as a group! We share our thoughts on this adventure this week.  Sun, aka Mrs. Future, then gives us a report on her online  with Adam Apollo, a futurist, speaker, and teacher who is involved in consciousness exploration, advanced technology, and the evolution of human potential. 

The biggest deal this week was the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, from which we feature some excerpts of keynote speakers, like Ross Ulbricht, founder of the controversial Silk Road service, recently out of prison.  We also have a clip of Michael Saylor, billionaire executive and big Bitcoin advocate.  Bobby and Sun share their bitcoin efforts, which you may find very helpful.   And this week with end with a report from AI’s Larry and Mary on new research on astrocytes in the function of the human brain. Enjoy!