Living in the Future

From headsets to room-scale experiences, VR is reshaping the gaming industry. In this episode, Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat talks about how far VR technology has come and where it’s headed next.

From smart fitness equipment to wearables, companies are gamifying exercise to make it more fun and are giving us tools to track our health and fitness journeys. In this episode, Victoria Song of The Verge shares what’s worth paying attention to and what the future of fitness tech holds.

TVs were once bulky pieces of furniture, but over the last few decades they have transformed into super-thin devices that can stream a wide variety of content and connect with our smartphones. In this episode, Phil Nickinson of Digital Trends weighs the merits of smart TVs compared to the “dumb displays” of the past.

Memorable characters like J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man and Samantha from Her offered a glimpse into a future where we can seamlessly communicate with machines, and where AI assistants truly understand us and can predict what we want. In this episode, Ben Bajarin at Creative Strategies explores how generative AI is reshaping the way we talk to computers and how we’ll see this evolve as more processing moves to the edge.

Imagine being able to stay connected wherever you go, untethered to the limits of cellular connectivity and Wi-Fi.  With satellite connectivity, this isn’t just a pipe dream. Pretty soon satellite-enabled phones will become mainstream and worrying about signal bars will be a thing of the past. Tune in with Light Reading’s Mike Dano to hear about how satellites thousands of miles away are opening up new possibilities for the mobile market. 

"Computer!" the Captain barks into the console of her starship – and, incredibly, the computer responds! Well ... it was incredible to audiences of the 1990s anyway, when the closest thing to "voice activation" was The Clapper. How did we go from applauding our lights on, to having conversations with Alexa and Google in less than twenty years? Tune in with Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge to find out! 

Transformers aren’t just action figures. Chatbots, ChatGPT, and other AI-powered applications using transformers are changing the way we get information and communicate. It seems like these applications have a brain of their own, but is that the case? Google’s Dan Mbanga breaks down what you need to know about how machine learning works. 

Scanners; communicators; computers – as exciting as the technology of the future can be, absolutely none of it matters without a constant connection to ... somewhere else. And the same goes for the technology of the present: every time you ask Alexa to play a song, or send your exercise stats to your Fitness Friends group chat, or navigate to a new part of town, you're relying on a connection that we used to call "going online" back when far fewer people were "on the internet." Here's how today's technology keeps most of the planet constantly connected.

From Total Recall's Johnny Cab to Minority Report's Lexuses of 2054, the self-driving car has co-starred opposite countless future-dwellers, a perennial signifier that "hey, this movie is set in the F U T U R E!" But about five years ago, the whole idea of a car that could drive you (instead of the other way around) started to get a lot closer to science fact than fiction. Michael Fisher (aka Captain2Phones) chats with author and podcaster Edward Niedermeyer about how far we’ve come with self-driving cars and what challenges lie ahead.

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