e520 — Cold Fusion Gaming

original photo, by Michael Martine, Sandwich MA June 2025. 
Animated by Google Veo3 July 2025 Published 14 July 2025 e520 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AI advertising, still photo animation, anime agents, Pollen Robotics, Unity tokamak fusion reactor digital twin and a whole lot more. Michael, Andy and Michael get things off to a fast start with an article all about AI advertising.  And how including AI inside does not correlate with positive impressions.  The Google Veo3 capability to turn still image prompts into short videos is next in focus.  The hero image for this episode was made using Veo3.  On deck next are the open source Reachy robots from Pollen Robotics newly available on Hugging Face, along with associated demo code and AI models.  Then, on Kickstarter, the co hosts consider an AI 3D character pod.  The Dipal D1 on Kickstarter trumpets itself as the “world’s first curved 3D AI Character Pod”.  The intrepid Games at Work team digs up the Gatebox example from 2017 and the associated episodes shared in the links below.  This even includes a discussion from 2018 about “cross-dimensional” human-AI agent marriages, which foreshadows the game “Date Everything” from the Wired article.  The next article is absolutely right in the wheelhouse for Games At Work:  South Korean scientists used Unity to create a digital twin of a toroidal fusion reactor.  And using the game engine’s physics engine, these scientists may have unlocked how to unleash fusion energy. Rounding out this episode is the upcoming LEGO launch of a new Arcade Machine.  This fun kit has a number of cool easter eggs in it, and the team’s looking forward to building it. What is your impression on “AI inside” advertising?  How do you think game engines may be used to further science (weird or otherwise)?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know!  These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Selected Links AI Futurism article: Something Hilarious Happens When Potential Customers See That a Product Has AI Features Terrence Eden’s blog post: