Tweet I have been training and teaching Choi Kwang Do as a defensive martial art and health improving activity for many years. I was very amazed to achieve my first black belt in it at the end of 2014. That journey was shared with all the family too for a long while. We all trained, taught and graded together for many years. In 2019 I was getting ready for my 3rd Dan grading when in a non related incident I managed to get a concussion slipping over in the kitchen making Easter dinner. That made me ease up on training for a good while, as I recovered. On getting back to full time training and c ..read more

Tweet It’s been a while since I posted anything for lots of reasons, that’s an offline conversation. However, this weekend something appeared on my feeds that was just too exciting not to do a quick test with and then share, which I already have on Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon and Facebook plus a bit of instagram. So, many channels to look at! Back in August 2022 I dived into using Midjourney’s then new GenAI for images from text. It was a magical moment in tech for me of which there have been few over the 50+ years of being a tech geek (34 of those professionally). The constant updates to the ..read more

Tweet This month was the AGM for the BCS Animation and Games specialist group that I have been chairing for a very long while now. I gave a presentation from a personal view point (this is not a work presentation and I make that clear in the disclaimers, though it is what I work in too of course), on the advances in Metaverse and GenAI content creation. The full YouTube version is below but the link to the blurb and bio (and the video) at the BCS is here We are always looking for presenters to come and share some ideas with our specialist group around all things games, animation, metaverse, es ..read more

Tweet Firstly, yes it looks like its a while since I posted on here, but that’s the challenge when work life and social/hobby life are one and the same thing. I have to save all the really good stuff for my professional output. However, I bought myself what is my 16th VR or AR headset with the Meta Quest 3 and as a long time user of such kit I wanted to share my personal (and only personal) thoughts about this bit of kit. Quest 3 box Headset and controllers Looking like the Aliens from Toy Story 3 with 3 eyes wearing a Quest 3 Our Quest 2 has been kept in our kitchen ready for anyone in the ..read more

Tweet Having my books Reconfigure and Cont3xt I am always using them and the story I created as a way to explore other mediums. I started drawing a few years ago to see if I could maybe go manga with it, that included buying some action figure mini drawing mannequins that have some tech and weapon props. I created some meta humans and have a unity based mocap suit from a kickstarter to see if I could produce anime. Audio voice generation has been another thing I tried. Each of these projects would be a significant amount of time, effort and probably cost too, but delving in as a mini proof of ..read more

Tweet In 2016 I wrote Cont3xt the follow up to Reconfigure and part of that was an upgrade our lead character gets. She has access to an API that can manipulate the physical world like the virtual, she builds that up into a Unity application for her smart phone in the first book. The second she gets an EyeBlend headset, state of the art (and still just a little ahead of Apple and co’s attempts. So she ports the Unity app and upgrades the messaging system for this high bandwidth device and to enhance the experience. Rather like all the developers are doing right at the moment. Life imitates art ..read more

Tweet Having announced/shared the S&P TMT extension of our industry analyst coverage of all things Metaverse I know there are few newer companies in the space that may not know what that means, 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.   Midjourney Cyberpunk Me Who? I been an industry analyst for nearly 7 years, but I have been in the ..read more

Tweet I had the honour of hosting my good friends from Gamesatwork.biz for a BCS animation and games event to hear about how they have managed to create compelling content in a weekly podcast for what is not approaching 400 episodes! The official BCS event link page and links to everything else about the BCS is here but I have added the youtube directly. Its very free form, not scripted and was a entertaining to be the interviewer, especially as I know Michael, Michael and Andy just know what to say and when to say it. BCS Animation and Games hosts Games at work dot biz team for a free form c ..read more

Tweet I was really happy to be invited back to my favourite podcast GamesAtWork dot Biz to share some air time with Michael and Andy last week. (One less Michael than usual unfortunately). As Andy and I are both in the UK this took the number of Brits on the show up to a majority hence the title. You can hear the latest episode on all the usual podcast places, or follow this link to ep386 Too many brits Amongst other things I got to enthuse about the latest iteration of my favourite real guitar teaching and playing app/game Rocksmith, now Rocksmith+ which for me really shows the power of instr ..read more

Tweet 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, the ..read more