Playing With Reality: Recent Episodes
Sogeti
We all know, the online world today is not as it once was.
It is filled with avatars, deep fakes, people playing with their own realities and all kinds of crazy stuff.
From travelling back in time to exploring the depths of the Metaverse, Playing With Reality takes a look at technology as it happens and challenges its boundaries. Join our host Menno Van Doorn, Research Director at Sogeti, as he takes a deep dive into technology with experts from the industry. If you are fascinated by the possibilities of the Metaverse and emerging technology, this podcast is for you.
Welcome to Playing with Reality, a new podcast by Sogeti, Part of the Capgemini Group.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they had bought the gaming company Activision Blizzard for a reported $67.1 billion. This was a watershed moment for the industry, and one which signalled a cultural shift as gaming became a truly mainstream entertainment medium. But how did we get here? How did gaming move from a niche industry dominated by teenagers, to one attracting thousands of fans to live esports events and millions streaming online? In this episode of Playing with Reality, we explore these questions and more, looking at what the future holds as other industries get more invested in the gaming world.
Today’s Guests
Joost Van Dreunen
Joost Van Dreunen is an academic, entrepreneur, investor and strategic advisor to start-ups and financial funds active in video games. He teaches courses on video games at the NYU Stern School of Business, and has written books, including “One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games.” Prior to this, Joost was the co-founder and CEO of SuperData Research, a games market research firm acquired by Nielsen in 2018.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joostvandreunen/
Koen Schobbers
Koen is a professional gamer specialising in the racing game Trackmania. He later became a host for ESPN, a board member and vice chair of the Athletes, Players & Community Commission of the Global Esports Federation and the founder of Parents of Play, a charity which seeks to restore and strengthen parents’ relationships with their gaming children. He is also the author of the book 'My Gaming Child', and has been a professional speaker since 2016, including at events like TEDx.
https://koenschobbers.nl/
Digital Twins are one of the most interesting technologies today attempting to recreate real life systems and processes in digital versions. These are mirror worlds which not only play with reality, they are trying to recreate it with true fidelity. But where did these technologies come from? Who were the early pioneers? And what does it mean to make a digital copy of something tangible and real? From automotive, to aerospace and even entertainment industries, Digital Twins are some of the most exciting and genuinely useful technologies to get widespread hype in recent years. In this episode of Playing with Reality, we look to discover more about their past, present and future.
Today’s Guests
Timoni West
Timoni West is the vice president of Product, Digital Twins and AI at Unity, a company whose cross-platform game engine Builds real-time 3D projects for various industries across games, animation, automotive, architecture. She’s been there for over 7 years, and over that time she has worked to lead advanced product development for spatial computing tools. Now she spends her time focusing on ensuring that the tools that Unity creates are available to all.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/timoni/
Karen Willcox
Karen Willcox is the Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin. Before this, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Through her research, she produces scalable computational methods for the design of next-generation engineered systems, and she is currently working on projects for institutions as prestigious as the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Research Laboratory, amongst many others. Earlier this year, Karen was invited to give a TEDx talk on the potential of digital twin technology - watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzfMLYw_-Ps.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-willcox-b6150b111/
In 2006, some of the globe’s top minds in technology met in California to talk about a new thing called “the metaverse”. People talked about virtual worlds and how to make them a reality, and during the conference, a roadmap was created. Now in 2022, the Metaverse is all the rage. Following Meta’s vast investments into their conception of the metaverse, and various other companies wanting to weigh in as well, it looks like the ideas born in that 2006 conference could become a reality. But how right were the predictions of the mid 2000s? And what did the early proponents of the metaverse create back then? In this episode of Playing With Reality, we take a look at the past and present of the metaverse, to get a broad view of where it is going in the future.
Today’s Guests
Philip Rosedale
Philip is a serial entrepreneur who founded Linden Lab in 1999, a company which would soon create Second Life, an avatar based, online multimedia platform. After leaving Linden Lab in 2010, Philip Started High Fidelity, a company which is developing a next-generation virtual reality platform with a current focus on spatial sound. In 2007, Philip was included in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World, and has won various other awards for his work in inventing groundbreaking technology.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/philiprosedale/
Jochen Hummel
Jochen Hummel is an entrepreneur, director and mentor with a background in coding. In 2006, he founded Metaversum, a company who created Twinity, an early virtual online world where avatars and their spaces were based on real people and real cities, which he led until 2010. Since then, he has worked in various other relms in the tech space, and is now the CEO of Coreon & ESTeam - a Multilingual AI and LangOps platform.
www.linkedin.com/in/ceojochenhummel/
Sogeti work closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/
As ideas for the metaverse and other online communities and spaces continue to grow and become more developed, it only makes sense that major companies and corporations now want to get in on the act. Of course, everyone has heard of Meta and the billions they have invested, but who else is doing exciting things in this space? What is the benefit of it to corporations in both the IT and non digital sectors? Could these spaces become the best new way for organisations to interact with their consumers? On this episode of Playing with Reality, we explore how companies of all sizes are looking to tap in to this exciting new technology.
Today’s Guests
Joe Pine
Joe is an author and management advisor and the cofounder of Strategic Horizons. He has also been a Visiting Scholar with the MIT Design Lab and a Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam. His books include “Infinite possibility” a multiverse taxonomy of reality, and “The Experience Economy”, which shows how goods and services are nice for companies to have, but that the economy nowadays is run by experiences.
Jerry Eitel
Jerry is a Partner Emeritus in the Tax Departments of the accounting group, Prager Metis, where he also serves as the Chief Metaverse Officer for their Metaverse office. With 35 years experience in the accounting profession, Jerry now oversees expansion and planning for Prager Metis’ Metaverse clients, and his responsibilities include managing the organisation of strategic partnerships within the Web3 and metaverse spaces.
Sogeti work closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/
Augmented Reality is one of the most exciting frontiers in modern tech - from Google Glass to Snapchat filters, it already plays a significant role in our lives, more than many might think. New developments in hardware and AR’s opportunities for online community engagement have driven the field forward, putting us at the precipice of widespread use in normal life. But are there any costs to this? And where did AR actually begin - with smartphone cameras, or simple eye glasses? In this episode of Playing with Reality, we look to the future of this hugely exciting field, finding out about the most exciting innovations and companies currently on the market, while exploring why the enhancement of sight is going to dominate the future of popular technology.
Today’s Guests
David Rose
David Rose is an entrepreneur, MIT lecturer, author, and expert on all things to do with designing a better metaverse. His current role is as CTO of Home Outside, an AR tool that will allow people to redesign their backyards, and before that, he founded other AR companies like Clearwater. He has lectured on digital technologies at MIT and many other prestigious institutions.
You can find more about him through his website, where you can also order his book, Supersight: https://www.supersight.world/
Jason McDowall
Jason is an investor and entrepreneur in AR companies in this space, who has been working in the field since the dawn of the internet in the mid 2000s. He is currently the VP Product and Head of Visual Experience at Ostendo Technologies, a company that has built a “Quantum Photonic Imager” something that optimizes the way in which consumers can view both worlds at the same time: The physical reality and the projected augmented reality.
He also has his own podcast, The AR Show, where he speaks to brightest minds in AR to learn more about the cutting edge of tech in this field.
You can subscribe to the AR Show here: https://www.thearshow.com/
Sogeti work closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/
What is life like living as a virtual avatar? Are the billions of dollars that Meta is spending on creating the metaverse a guarantee for success? Will the obsession with our carefully crafted digital doppelgangers turn society into a virtual playground? And will it be heaven, or a nightmare? In this inaugural episode of Playing with Reality, our host Menno Van Doorn speaks to author and professor Beth Coleman and Sogeti infrastructure engineer Martijn Klerks about their lives in the virtual world, to see what forming your own online reality is really like.
Today’s Guests
Beth Coleman is an Associate Professor of Data & Cities at the University of Toronto, where she directs the City as Platform lab. Her research focuses on smart technology & machine learning, urban data, and civic engagement. In 2011, she published the book Hello Avatar, an examination of online identity and the ‘x-reality’ between the virtual and the real.
https://ischool.utoronto.ca/profile/beth-coleman/
Martijn Klerks is an infrastructure engineer at Sogeti. He is also a hardware specialist in VR technologies, working with Slime VR to create affordable and open source VR technologies available to the public.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martijn-klerks/?locale=en_US
Sogeti works closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/
We all know, the online world today is not as it once was.
It is filled with avatars, deep fakes, people playing with their own realities and all kinds of crazy stuff.
From travelling back in time to exploring the depths of the Metaverse, Playing With Reality takes a look at technology as it happens and challenges its boundaries. Join our host Menno Van Doorn, Research Director at Sogeti, as he takes a deep dive into technology with experts from the industry. If you are fascinated by the possibilities of the Metaverse and emerging technology, this podcast is for you.
Welcome to Playing with Reality, a new podcast by Sogeti, Part of the Capgemini Group.