I decided to create a very short metaverse evolution explainer video, but using GenAI. It is based on looking at patterns, we have all got used to moving from paper maps to digital ones, with GPS and now fully instrumented digital twins with traffic and other information. That leap applies to many other use cases. It’s all metaverse – digital to physical and back again, people, machines and data. All on my own midjourney.com, runway.ml and luma.ai accounts. Also learn a lot more about how hard it can be to wrangle AI to what you really want, but it works 🙂
What was mad about this was I generated my key images in midjourney and gave a couple of goes at runway that I was happy with (also spliced together and the talking soundtrack is runway), but a day after I had it where I wanted Luma.ai went live and I gave that a go. For a few of the scenes it was just much more what I needed. There is a point where you just have to hit publish, but these things just keep improving as a base tool, let alone the skills also improving to ask for the right thing. It is very much a creative process even if the mantra is often AI is taking over.
As an industry analyst at a well known company (i.e. this is not about feeding edge as it is just a place to blog and hold the rights for my novels now) covering all things Metaverse, industrial, enterprise and consumer, I know there are few newer companies in the space that may not know what being an analyst means to them, so here is an updated and repurposed blog post I wrote a few years ago else where about what an industry analyst does and why you might want to talk to us. (about any of our coverage areas not just metaverse). Here is the who, what, where and when raison d’être for industry analysts as I see it.
Who?
I been an industry analyst for nearly 8 years, but I have been in the emerging technology industry for well over 30 years as a software engineer and architect and as a writer and presenter. It is not uncommon for an industry analyst to have a lot of field experience, I used to brief analysts during my corporate life as IBM too. Equally many analysts are from a journalistic or statistics background, trained in finding and sharing facts and figures. Of course, there are many personality types within the profession overall, though in general the analyst profession is a people based one developing contacts and relationships across industry areas. Analysts have to take on board a lot of information but cut through the marketing hype to find patterns and facts based on their experience. Not all analysts are going to be long in the tooth like me, but it often helps. In the case of this metaverse wave having been what might now be called an influencer of the 2006 enterprise virtual worlds wave as a metaverse evangelist, putting Wimbledon into second life and developing solutions in the pre IoT connectivity days of things with the then new MQTT, not to mention early days of many current technology trends of web, e-commerce, social media, blogging and personally in gaming. My research agenda primarily covers emerging technology, where everything old is new again. An important thing to add, and certainly one that is true of my group is that analysts maintain integrity and impartiality by being separated from the commercial side of the company, though we do do commercial work, we are not do pay for play where I work. The content of what we cover and say is not based on how much clients pay, nor is it is based on how much the analyst relations department spends on a dinner. Everyone has their own motivation and connection to a subject but, impartiality, trust in treating off the record discussion and, building a reputation is core for our analysts.
What?
Large enterprises and the smallest of start-ups, and everyone in between, share a need to understand the market they are currently in, or look to move to. What is the competition up to? What is resonating in a market? What is going to totally disrupt the current plan? Start-ups need attention and connections to raise funding, enterprises need ongoing growth for shareholders and investors. Analyst companies are there to help provide answers and perspective on these sorts of questions. A large corporate entity may well have a competitive analysis department, but they will be focussed on the other big companies, less the quirky start-up set to make a dent in the industry. Smaller companies are busy just trying to do what they do, and may not have the time to look up and see what is going on around them. Analysts are always across a spectrum of companies, sizes and industry types. Whether it is writing regular short form reports on companies and their latest services, longer form reports across an entire industry sector, running ongoing surveys across thousands of industry types for directional data, custom consulting work, webinars, presentations, offering Merger and Acquisition (M&A) due diligence or just a quick call to answer a client question, analysts offer their considered opinions, backed by experience and data.
One of the other things that is important to consider, especially as a start-up, is to be in the minds of relevant analysts. We talk to people all the time, and suddenly a subject might come up, it may be a complete tangent, which is where we pattern match to say “I saw this really interesting approach from…”. Those conversations might be with VC’s, with companies looking for partners or with potential customers of the company.
Where?
The actual answer to this is anywhere. We take briefings from companies, typically for around 30mins – 1 hour on the phone, over web video conference, in person at trade shows. We try to ensure we do talk to companies, not just look at the web or a press release, as I mentioned above this is a people business. Trade shows such as the huge MWC bread and butter to analysts and for me Hannover Messe and Augmented World Expo are also important. By Example my experience of MWC in 2019, was 30-minute meetings scheduled with 30 mins walking time between them for 3 days, I logged 10 miles a day walking just in the conference centre. That is a lot of conversations and presentations from a varied set of companies.
Social media has always been a useful place for me personally and professionally since the early days, and analysts are often to be found there now. I am always willing to hear about interesting things on twitter/X as @epredator, on linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/epredator/ (and now mastodon and many other places).
When?
Anytime you need to know something across your industry, or you need the industry to know about something you are doing or about to do that’s when you can benefit from an analyst company, or multiple analysts’ perspective. A start-up may be in stealth, not ready to announce yet, and that is where analyst’s integrity is key, tell us what you are doing off the record and that may well lead to some suggestions that help or when you come out of stealth a better description from us as we share what you are doing.
Whilst we are separated from the commercial side of things, we are aware that what we produce is the core product for the company. Companies pay to access the basic reports, long form reports and detailed survey data is also charged for at a different rate, as is our time on the phone answering questions or doing custom consulting. However, companies telling us things is not something that anyone pays to do, and, in those conversations, we do often share our thoughts, so you can get something from a briefing, no need to just broadcast what you do. A final tip, if you are publicly known, have as much information as possible easily accessible, in a slide deck, or on a website. We all take notes during conversations but being able to look things up after the event is important. Who is the company, where were they founded, not just how cool the product is has great importance, this is a people business.
Ok so I tried something a little recursive in nature to see what ChatGPT AI do, and I think this is very much in the write style and has some surprising little rant in it about the process of writing a sitcom. I like this better than the first Blackadder sketch I had in the previous post.
write a Blackadder sketch of Blackadder writing a Blackadder sketch
Baldrick: My lord, what are you doing?
Blackadder: I am trying to write a sketch for our next Blackadder episode, Baldrick.
Baldrick: But my lord, you are Blackadder. Why are you writing a sketch about Blackadder writing a sketch?
Blackadder: Because, Baldrick, it is a clever and meta way to poke fun at the absurdity of the situation.
Baldrick: Ah, I see. But what is the sketch about, my lord?
Blackadder: It is about Blackadder sitting at his desk, trying to come up with a sketch for the next Blackadder episode. But every idea he comes up with is met with objections from the other characters.
Baldrick: Like what, my lord?
Blackadder: Well, for example, I might come up with an idea for a sketch where Blackadder and I go on a quest to find the Holy Grail. But then Prince George would object, saying that we already did that in a previous episode.
Baldrick: Oh, I see. And then what would happen, my lord?
Blackadder: Then I would come up with another idea, perhaps involving a time-traveling Blackadder going back to the Tudor era. But then Queenie would object, saying that we already did that in a previous episode as well.
Baldrick: So Blackadder can’t come up with any new ideas for sketches?
Blackadder: Exactly, Baldrick. It’s a satirical commentary on the creative challenges of writing for a long-running television show.
Baldrick: Oh, I get it now, my lord. That sounds like a very clever sketch.
Blackadder: Yes, Baldrick, I thought so too. But now I just need to figure out how to end it.
Baldrick: How about Blackadder giving up and going for a walk instead?
Blackadder: Hmm, not bad, Baldrick. Not bad at all. I think I’ll go with that. Thank you for your assistance.
Baldrick: Always happy to help, my lord.
Blackadder: Now let’s hope this sketch is a hit with the audience.
(Blackadder gets up from his desk and exits, with Baldrick following behind.)
I have carried on experimenting with the wonderful Midjourney app on Discord. My previous post had some images and a degree of explanation, but as a reminder. This is one of the new generation of publicly available of AI based image generation from text. Just watching the flow of requests and the range of styles and images that appear constantly is fascinating. It generates 4 images for each text request which you can then curate and push for further generation of more similar to that one. It can also take a web image not generated by it as inspiration.
This however, made me chortle, then stop to ponder, then simply just say way. I said /Imagine Lego John Wick – that is all I asked
Look at the variety of styles from the top right and bottom left as actual minifies with shadows to a stylised top left looking as if he is paid in lego pieces not gold, and bottom right an angular representation but a cool image.
Then of course that got me going onto the obvious /imagine Lego predator
This just looks great, lots of predator variations, which as has happened with the films is pretty much in the storyline to have multiple tribes. (BTW Watch Prey the latest Predator movie on Disney+/Hulu it is really good !
Once again Midjourney hit me with its range of styles it delves into. I moved off the lego thing for a while and asked to see Laurel and Hardy breakdancing
This is a second generation image from a set of already very good images. Laurel and Hardy are of course well known, but there are no breakdancing scenes to refer to. Also, it chose black and white, presumably because most of the source content was black and white. The quirky style of this compared to the photo realistic lego minifigs and the stacks of other images show how amazingly versatile this approach is. You should be able to get a glimpse of the madness on my public facing page in midjourney (if that works )so I can stop posting here all the time saying “look at this: 🙂 You may need to change the second in from the right navigation drop down to grids or all, it seems to default to the large upscaled individual images.
Firstly, yes its been a while since I posted here, I could have done with an AI clone of me carrying on sharing interesting things. I was out mainly due to an annoying post-ailment “thing” (medical term) hitting my facial nerves which meant for months any screen time trying to read or write was visually and mentally uncomfortable. That was followed with a dose of Covid that knocked me out for a while but also seems to have had a potential positive impact on whatever else was going on. Anyway, I am back. Anything happened the past few months, I mean 1/2 a year?
I suddenly felt compelled to blog about some of the marvellous work going on with AI image generation of late with things such as Dall-e and Midjourney becoming available to more people. I have so far only used Midjourney, which is accessed through Discord. In the relevant channel you simply type the command /imagine followed by any descriptive text you fancy and it will generate four images based on that, with often surprising results. Any of those images can be selected as the root to generate more in that style, or you can upscale, get a big version, of one you favourite.
Handy hint- The mobile version of Discord really likes to scroll to new items, midjourney works by updating your post to the channel. As so many posts are being generated every few seconds you might think you can leave the app on your post to see the results but very quickly you will zoom up the screen. Constant scrolling back to try and catch your images being generated is a bit of a pain. However if you log into midjourney.com with Discord ID it will present you with your collection and lots of links to get back to do things with them. The Discord search doesn’t seem to work on userid etc so it took me a while to figure this out.
After a few attempts, and with one eye on the political situation and crisis faced in the UK I asked mid journey “an artist forced to stop painting in order to work in a bank” and got this wonderful set of images
I also asked it to generate a protest by the people
Rather than continue the doom and gloom it was time to go a bit more techie 🙂 I asked it to show me directing the metaverse from a control centre
An obvious course of action was to explore my Reconfigure and Cont3xt novels and this is where I was very impressed by whatever is going on with this AI. I asked to see “a cyberpunk girl manipulating the physical world using an augmented reality digital twin” and it seems that Roisin (@Axelweight) is in there somewhere 🙂
This was worth exploring and picking couple of the images to then seed generating more similar to that which generated these two
And this one
These were good but the first version of the top right image in generation 1 was the one I did a more detail version of on its own. It could be the cover of the third book couldn’t it?
In case this seems a all a bit too serious, I did ask a slightly weirder question of the AI and got this.
For a happy image how about this /imagine a bright green planet full of life
But back to the surreal and unusual and predlet 1.0 and I share a joke we “invented” when she was quite young, we were passing the pub in Lock’s Heath having been to the supermarket, she looked at the pavement and saw a creature. She said “dad look there’s a worm coming out of the pub” to which I replied “and he is legless”, and here it is
As this kind of AI generation evolves from the static image to the moving one and then onto virtual world and the metaverse, what a wonderfully weird set of worlds we will be able to dream/nightmare up 🙂
As many people who pop along here will know back in 2006 (and even before that) I have been somewhat passionate in explaining and sharing what can be done with things like game technology, virtual worlds etc to help with human communication, that includes entertainment (which is often regarded as not a serious business), office type business, education, industrial digital twins the list goes on. Metaverse is a handy word to bundle all this together and whilst not tightly defined I think many of us know what we mean. This month I wrote a piece for the BCS which is available to read here and they have nicely highlighted the phrase ““Travelling and actual teleportation aside, do you think that we should be able to find better ways to feel we are with people and to have shared experiences?” Whatever you think the Metaverse is evolving to, just consider if the way you are doing things now is the best it could possibly be given the tech available. Things evolve and move, not always replacing everything behind them but adding.
Having sad that, it is worth reminding everyone that the original work in 2006 in Second Life was mostly about pulling data from other sources into the environment, and doing things with it, this eventually led to building Wimbledon’s 2006 course with the ball trajectory from Hawkeye rendered there.
There is an ongoing discussions is about interoperability of Metaverse or virtual world platforms. These range from is it desirable to have objects from world x appear in world y and then often hit the barrier of platform x has a completely different rendering engine to platform y. The former is a style and even a business question, why does an environment of any type exist, real, virtual, augmented, projected, whatever. This then leads to the technical wars around content being “in” a development or build environment. Importing of meshes, textures, animation rigs etc is one way to look at Metaverse evolution but I think it is also worth considering the potential for things like remote rendering, if the unifying standard for content sharing was actually containers, of potentially any size or shape and level of detail, the anything from environment x could appear in environment y and even interact with it to vary degrees depending on permissions or needs. My Nvidia RTX ray traced shiny car could appear in the most basic of 3d environments as I am rendering the car my end, and the virtual world is processing a container and stream. This is after all what we do when we video chat, each of our cameras is doing some work and being hosted by a basic integration layer. Yes I know 3d and collisions and physics and and etc. all make it more complex but it is worth considering that other ways of working can exist to the build and compile we are used to from games. Also, from what I remember of Snowcrash avatars are rendered by the person’s own device, those with worse computing power have more basic avatars in world? Also, we already did some of this back n 06/07 it just takes a different way of thinking.
Talking to thinking, literally, I was invited to join the Games at Work dot Biz podcast again and I was more than happy to give a shout out to a book by Prof Richard Bartle on virtual worlds and our god like powers over them. Checkout the podcast and links are here and on any player you have, give it a rating to help the guys too please.
There is a lot of hype of the new Matrix movie but today a demo/experience rendered in Unreal 5 live on Xbox series x and PS5 went live. The intro movie is fantastic, sometimes you can’t tell real from virtual, other times you can, but that often feels deliberate, toying with the uncanny valley.
If you don’t have an next gen console then there is a video, and it is well worth watching, remembering this is live rendered in Unreal 5 not precanned cut scene.
Many of us in tech have an affinity to the Matrix. I remember the first one, sat in the offices in Hursley building early web sites and shops, engaged in the start of digital transformation. The free character drip screen savers everywhere and even the old clunky web we had clips to watch “I Know Kung Fu” etc. Many of us were gamers too so this blaring of physical and digital was really appealing. I even bought the soundtrack, not on old fashioned CD but on Mini disc 🙂 Its always pushing the envelope and as this video shows, they are still at it! Metaverse FTW 🙂
What a bumper time for games it is, and on 9th November the latest of my all time favourite racing games Forza Horizon arrived on the Xbox, The games have always had a large free roaming area to collect, drive, race and photograph some fantastic cars. Each generation gets more jaw dropping as it pushes the limits of what can be done with the graphics, sounds physics. Number 4 in the series was set in the UK, building on a huge map that merged many of key locations and and cities into a manageable terrain. Number 5 has moved to Mexico and even more stunning scenes await there. The game is bundled into Microsoft Xbox Game Pass, but being a fan I bought the full version and all the expansions, knowing full well that I will be playing this on and off for years.
The beauty of Forza Horizon is that “where we are going we don’t need roads”. There are roads and tracks and you can just stick to those but you can also tear across the landscape in even the most unsuitable car possible. This may seem at odds with the precision feel of the driving simulation but it always manages to walk that line between arcade lunacy and pure driving simulator. Why would you go tearing around the scenery, well its for the views like this.
The scenery alters across many different biomes, the time of day and weather also make for great variations and the game itself switches between spring, summer, autumn and winter every week.
Also of note is the radio stations, prerecorded play lists of rock, dance, classical music that have wonderful DJ voice overs that often refer back to things that are happening such as event s just raced or about to come up. It is enjoyable to just pick a car, and casually (or otherwise) drive around the place seeing the sites and smoking up the tunes.
A feature of Forza that I always share and enthuse about is the custom paint and decals for the cars. The game has managed to preserve artwork with each generation of the game so effort in creating these is not wasted. I use the decals as a demonstration of in game advertising and support with both my martial art and my Reconfigure books represented, along with a stylised predator face based on the Wii Mii version. These designs appear with my car in other peoples games and can also be downloaded, though there are some much better painters doing some great work to check out.
There are cars from 3 wheelers to high end supercars, over 500 different models and all hyper detailed in and out. There are drag races, giant leaps and even houses to buy.
There are lots of online multiplayer angles to join in on, but I really enjoy driving against the Drivatars of friends and family. Here, a single player race is populated by names and cars of people you know driving to some degree in the way they would drive if they were there. This degree of personalisation is always great fun.
If you are looking at these shots and saying, oh it all looks too shiny to be real though, I saw this vehicle parked outside a London train station in a recent (and long time since I have been out) trip.
I have already blasted through many of the races and levels, the last game was one of the few I have level capped and “prestiged” on. That really just comes with lots of time more than any particular skill, though doing well in races, performing superb stunts, drifting, speeding and crashing the scenery all ramp up the levels more quickly.
It is also great that I can play this on PC and on Xbox Series X but also now its available as a cloud game. Its juts a pity that our communication infrastructure on the train lines is not up to using that, but its still good if other members of the family are playing something else at home.
As you may have noticed I have been in and around the virtual world and metaverse for a long while. I have spent decades helping people understand the basics of virtual worlds and benefits they bring to us all. The pandemic has highlighted the need to do some things differently so it is not a suprise that Metaverse is trending in all sorts of places once again. You don’t have to look far to find replays of the ebullient money money from US TV Jim Cramer “describing” the Metaverse is such odd mixed up sets of keywords and company names that it had me crying with laughter and with sadness.
Just to follow his stream of blurb he went through. I only need 10 minuted to explain it all to him, as do any of us, or even better just logon to a virtual world, anyone of them and talk to someone, experience something. I was reminded of the conversation about the internet, the web, ecommerce, social media and so many other emerging technologies. We always get to this stage of apparently influential people getting it so wrong yet bringing so much attention to something.
To be fair, we all have to learn things, but maybe we don’t all then talk about them to a large TV audience in the context of financial investments until we do understand the words. I would be one of many to be happy to explain what the vision of the metaverse is, what the practical implementation of that is today and why it is some of the words used but not in the same order or context. Also… its not all about NFTs either !
He said (slightly paraphrased):
“It’s Unity with an oculus looking at a t-shirt its Nvidia?”
“It’s a hologram”
“You go into a room to listen to Mozart but listen to Beethoven and these people don’t exist”
I hope my virtual world descriptions on TV (of which there are a few) and possibly the relationship between virtual worlds that form a proper metaverse are not quite on this level. As on my TV showreel page with the opensim conversation, added here from 2011 for completeness. Yes a decade ago on saturday morning kids TV, a live virtual world. Cmon people lets do this thing !
Meanwhile I am off to google something up on the inter webs.
Hot on the heels of my BCS animation and games webinar on the games of 2020 I was delighted to be invited to pop along to my favourite podcast, Games At Work, as a guest to talk about my personal views of some of the thing going on in the tech and games worlds including AR and VR.
To hear us riff on a range of subjects head over to here to website and the show links or look for Games at work dot biz on your favourite podcast repository.
I have had the honour to be on before, the last time was in June 2020, a mentally trying time that the podcast recording really helped with. Its always a blast to record, they kindly had me on years ago too when I first published my Sci-fi Novels Reconfigure and Cont3xt. Given it is now on episode 311 you can tell this podcast is certainly not a fad or a flash in the pan but a wonderfully produced and entertaining experience, despite my ramblings and book pitching. Enjoy.