The media and technology landscape is poised for significant shifts as we move into 2025. With Brendan Carr, a contributor to Project 2025 and a staunch advocate for conservative viewpoints, named as the next chairman of the FCC, the regulatory focus is set to intensify on major tech companies and broadcasters. Carr’s commitment to addressing what he terms a “censorship cartel” has already sparked debate about the future of free speech and corporate accountability in digital spaces.

Under the incoming leadership, the FCC is expected to scrutinize content moderation practices, reassess regulations for broadcasters, and take a closer look at perceived biases in major tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and Apple. Additionally, this shift may open doors for companies aligned with deregulation, such as Elon Musk’s ventures, which stand to benefit from a more lenient regulatory approach.

While these changes unfold, one thing is clear: the digital ecosystem is entering a period of uncertainty and transformation. For individuals and businesses alike, now is the time to double down on the tools that protect your online presence. Privacy, security, and encryption should no longer be optional but essential components of navigating this evolving environment.

Why Act Now?

1. Evolving Regulations: With new policies on the horizon, it’s difficult to predict how data privacy, content moderation, and platform accessibility might be affected. Protecting your information proactively ensures you stay ahead of potential shifts.

2. Corporate and State Surveillance: Increased scrutiny of tech platforms may inadvertently lead to enhanced monitoring of user activities. Tools like end-to-end encryption, secure browsers, and privacy-focused platforms can shield your communications and data.

3. Uncertainty Breeds Vulnerability: As regulatory battles play out, misinformation and disruptions may rise. Using tools like encrypted email, secure VPNs, and decentralized apps can help maintain your digital autonomy.

Tools to Get Started

• Encrypted Messaging Apps: Apple’s Messages, Signal, Telegram (with Secret Chats), and other secure apps prioritize privacy.
• Privacy-First Browsers: Consider using TOR, or Brave/Firefox with privacy extensions like uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere.
• Privacy-First Search: Consider DuckDuckGo or Ecosia
• Secure Operating Systems: For advanced users, explore Tails OS or Whonix to safeguard sensitive activities.
• Password Management: Protect accounts with tools like Apple’s iCloud Passwords, Bitwarden or 1Password.
• VPN Services: Use trusted VPNs like ProtonVPN or NordVPN to anonymize your online presence.

A New Era Requires New Habits

As the media landscape undergoes significant shifts, the time to take charge of your digital presence is now. By integrating privacy-focused tools into your daily life, you can protect your personal and professional data from potential misuse or overreach.

The tools are available, and the need has never been greater. Start small but start now—your digital security is worth it.

Why ProtonVPN?

ProtonVPN, developed by the team behind ProtonMail, was built with a clear mission: to protect online freedom and privacy for everyone. Its roots in privacy-focused Switzerland and its commitment to open-source transparency make it a favorite among privacy advocates. But beyond the technology, adopting ProtonVPN reflects something deeper—the intention to safeguard your digital life.

A Tool for a Surveillance-Free Future

ProtonVPN’s independence from the Eyes alliances reinforces its role as a champion of online privacy. By choosing a VPN provider located outside of these surveillance networks, you are taking an intentional step toward protecting your personal data from prying eyes. It’s not just about technology; it’s about sovereignty over your digital life.

When you combine ProtonVPN’s Swiss jurisdiction with its robust encryption and privacy features, you’re not only securing your connection but also making a statement against the pervasive surveillance culture of the modern internet.

What Are the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances?

1. Five Eyes (FVEY): A post-WWII intelligence-sharing agreement between the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This alliance focuses on monitoring global communications and sharing information.

2. Nine Eyes: Expands the Five Eyes to include Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway.

3. Fourteen Eyes: Further adds Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, creating an extended network for surveillance cooperation.

These countries often engage in extensive monitoring of internet traffic, including metadata collection and data interception, often without the knowledge or consent of individuals.

The Intentional Choice: Always-On VPN

Using ProtonVPN is more than just enabling a switch when you want to avoid snooping eyes; it’s about making a deliberate decision to prioritize your security every time you go online. The always-on mindset ensures:

1. Consistent Protection: Whether you’re scrolling social media, checking bank accounts, or reading blogs, your connection remains encrypted.

2. Peace of Mind: There’s no need to remember to enable it or worry about unprotected moments.

3. Freedom from Borders: With ProtonVPN, geo-restrictions dissolve, granting access to content worldwide.

However, this level of commitment does come with occasional challenges.

Acknowledging the Trade-Offs

While ProtonVPN’s robust network seamlessly supports most online activities, certain websites or services might balk at VPN traffic. Some platforms (such as banking sites or streaming services) may require additional steps, like CAPTCHA verification or temporarily disabling the VPN for access. These moments are rare and manageable but worth noting as part of the intentional choice to prioritize privacy.

Privacy in Tandem: The Power of Private Browsing

Pair ProtonVPN with private browsing mode (or incognito mode), and you’re taking another significant step toward controlling your digital footprint. Private browsing helps by:

• Preventing browser history and cookies from being stored.

• Reducing the trail of breadcrumbs left behind on your device.

While private browsing alone doesn’t anonymize your activity—your IP address is still visible—it works hand-in-hand with ProtonVPN to complete the circle of privacy.

Toward a More Intentional Digital Future

By combining tools like ProtonVPN and private browsing, you’re not just protecting your data; you’re making a statement about how you value your online life. This isn’t about paranoia—it’s about intentionality. In a world where so much of your data is passively collected and monetized, choosing to actively guard your privacy is an empowering act of self-respect.

Platforms and Availability

ProtonVPN ensures comprehensive coverage across a wide range of platforms, making it accessible for nearly every device and operating system. This versatility allows you to secure your connection no matter how you access the internet:

• • VPN for Windows: Seamlessly integrates with Windows devices, offering robust security with an easy-to-use interface.
• • VPN for macOS: Designed for Mac users, combining intuitive design with top-notch privacy features.
• • VPN for Android: Protect your mobile browsing and app data with a user-friendly app tailored for Android devices.
• • VPN for iOS: A sleek, secure app for iPhone and iPad users, ensuring on-the-go privacy.
• • VPN for Linux: Advanced users can enjoy command-line tools and easy setup for maximum flexibility.
• • VPN for Chrome: A browser extension that encrypts your browsing directly within Chrome.
• • VPN for Firefox: Protect your browsing activity with ProtonVPN’s dedicated Firefox extension.
• • VPN for Chromebook: Optimized for Chrome OS, ensuring that your Chromebook stays secure and private.
• • VPN for Android TV: Bring privacy to your entertainment with ProtonVPN’s support for Android TV.
• • VPN for Apple TV: Safeguard your streaming data and bypass geo-restrictions effortlessly.

With apps and extensions tailored for nearly every platform, ProtonVPN ensures that privacy is never out of reach, no matter how or where you connect.

Conclusion

ProtonVPN isn’t just a service; it’s a lifestyle choice that aligns with a more thoughtful and intentional approach to using the internet. Yes, there may be occasional hurdles, but the payoff—peace of mind, security, and freedom—is worth every moment of adjustment.

So, flip the switch on ProtonVPN, enable private browsing, and step into the future of mindful digital living. Your privacy, your choice.

The TOR (The Onion Router) browser encrypts and anonymizes your internet traffic by routing it through multiple servers, making it nearly impossible to track your online activity back to you. This one behavioral shift can have an enormous impact:

1. Reduce Your Attack Surface: By hiding your IP address and encrypting traffic, TOR makes it much harder for hackers, advertisers, or governments to target you.

2. Clean Up Your Consumer Profile: TOR helps eliminate the endless tracking and profiling that happens with mainstream browsers, keeping your online behavior private.

3. Protect Your Privacy: In an age where data breaches are rampant, your personal information is a goldmine. TOR adds a critical layer of protection to ensure your data remains yours.

If using TOR feels like too big of a leap for now, there are other privacy-focused options to consider:

• Safari: With built-in anti-tracking features, Safari works to keep advertisers from building a profile about you.

• Brave: This browser blocks ads and trackers by default, ensuring a safer, faster browsing experience.

Additional Tips for Everyday Privacy:

• Browse with Private or Incognito Mode by default. This reduces cookie tracking and session data.

• Avoid logging into personal accounts (especially with TOR) when researching or browsing sensitive topics.

• Use a secure, privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo.

Taking control of your privacy starts with small, intentional steps. Whether you dive into TOR or start by switching to a privacy-focused browser, remember this: your data is your power. Protect it.

• Signal Messenger
• ProtonVPN
• Privacy-Focused Browsers
• DuckDuckGo
• ProtonMail and Apple iCloud Custom Domains for Email

Signal Messenger
Signal is a powerful tool that stands out for its seamless blend of robust security and usability. Unlike traditional messaging platforms, Signal offers end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default, protecting your conversations from prying eyes, and doesn’t store metadata—an ideal choice for those who understand the critical importance of data integrity in today’s digital landscape. For those in development and tech, Signal also aligns well with the principles of open-source transparency, providing full access to its code for audit and customization. The app’s straightforward UX makes it a perfect fit for everyday communication, whether you’re casually messaging or coordinating with others at events where privacy is paramount.

Category: Messaging. Link: https://signal.org/

ProtonVPN
If you’re new to VPNs, ProtonVPN is a solid choice for keeping your online activity private. It’s based in Switzerland, a country known for strong privacy protections and independence from global surveillance alliances like the “5 Eyes” (Or any other eyes for that matter. This is a group of countries that share intelligence). This means that ProtonVPN doesn’t have to share your information with any government surveillance networks. ProtonVPN also has a no-logs policy, meaning it doesn’t track or store what you do online, so you can browse securely and privately. Plus, it works across all your devices, making it easy to use anywhere you go.

Category: VPN, Link: https://protonvpn.com

Privacy-Focused Browsers
For non-Apple users, Brave and Firefox are excellent choices for secure, privacy-oriented browsing. Both browsers are built with privacy in mind: Brave blocks ads and trackers by default, giving you a faster, more private browsing experience without extra setup. It’s based on Chrome, so is widely compatible. Firefox, with its robust privacy controls and open-source foundation, empowers users to control their data and limit tracking from the ground up. Both options offer reliable alternatives to mainstream browsers that often monetize user data, making them solid picks for privacy-conscious users on non-Apple platforms.

For Apple platform users, I recommend Safari. It’s deep system integration, syncing with iCloud, and the ability to set Private Browsing as a default make this an amazing choice. See Apple’s commitment to privacy and security here. Best of all, there are no downloads. It’s built-in.

Category: Web browsing, Links: Safari, Brave, Firefox

DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a user-friendly search engine designed to prioritize your privacy. Unlike many traditional search engines, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your searches or store personal information, ensuring your queries remain confidential. Additionally, when you click on a search result, DuckDuckGo prevents your search terms from being shared with the destination website, further protecting your privacy. For added convenience, DuckDuckGo offers a “Sync & Backup” feature that allows you to securely synchronize your bookmarks and passwords across devices without compromising your privacy. DuckDuckGo is available as a default search engine in every modern browser.

Category: Search engine, Link: https://duckduckgo.com/

ProtonMail and Apple iCloud Custom Domains for Email
From the same team as ProtonVPN, ProtonMail is an email service designed to keep your messages private and secure. Unlike typical email providers, ProtonMail encrypts your emails, so only you and the person you’re emailing can read the messages—even ProtonMail itself can’t access them. It’s based in Switzerland, a country with strict privacy laws, which means your data is well protected from outside requests.

With iCloud+ and Apple Mail, you can use your own custom email domain (like yourname@yourdomain.com) while keeping Apple’s strong privacy protections. This feature allows you to manage personalized email addresses directly within the Apple ecosystem, adding flexibility without sacrificing privacy.

To set it up, go to iCloud.com or use the Settings app on your Apple device, navigate to iCloud > iCloud Mail > Custom Email Domain, and follow the setup prompts. Apple guides you through connecting your custom domain to iCloud, so your personalized email can be used seamlessly in Apple Mail across all your devices. Best of all, Apple’s privacy practices apply, so your data isn’t tracked or shared with advertisers, giving you the convenience of a custom domain with Apple’s focus on privacy.

Category: Email, Links: https://proton.me/mail, https://apple.com/icloud/

The potential of unencumbered communication between people, real people, was mind blowing. In those days we had “long distance calls” – you had to pay per minute to reach people outside of the arbitrarily placed boundaries (they were intentional, but created as a toll by telcos). This meant you really only called people that weren’t in your city when there was some sense of urgency, or you had business reasons.

Along comes the web, which gave those that cared to learn how, the ability to publish anything we wanted to – for anyone on earth to read. The history of the web is covered well elsewhere so I’ll spare you that rollercoaster. At the time, say 1995, big news media and publishers controlled the narrative, and people were simply one-way consumers – reading magazines, newspapers, and watching TV as the sole sources of information inputs. There were exceptions of course (the BBS, Usenet, FidoNet, Compuserve, AOL, etc.) but most people didn’t know about them.

The sense of wonder and possibility that accompanied this new Information Age has materialized in my world in the form of technology startups. I use the term startup, though it’s not really the best descriptor. It’s more like tests, or more commonly MVPs: I have an idea for a thing, dissect it, build it, then let a few people use it and see what happens. If there’s enough interest, I’ll add a revenue model and test/iterate.

By the way, this is a terrible approach for most founders and will result in a lot of lost sleep and relationships. If you’re looking for the quickest path to MVP, please pick up the Startup Owners Manual and read every page. I do not recommend the “build it and they will come” approach.

I digress. I’ve been reflecting on this ability to make things quickly quite a bit lately. It feels a little like a superpower. I can take something that exists as a simple idea to the computer screen in all of its glory. It may be ugly, but it will work. There’s a term in web development called “full stack” which means front end (browser/client side using HTML/CSS/Javascript etc.) and back end (server side databases/scripting languages, etc.). Today most people are trained (or choose) to specialize in one or the other. There are technical and non-technical founders, single founders in search of co-founders to fill some gap or even help formulate the idea itself.

I’ve been working on a few ideas and will present them here for your scrutiny and feedback. With the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro, one of these ideas has been occupying more time in my brain than it has in a while. It may be the first to materialize… it’s a new take on the web in 3D with no changes required to the web itself. It works with existing websites and infrastructure. More on that soon.

How about you? What’s your superpower?

How many of you remember what the gaming ecosystem looked like in 2007? There were consoles, PC gaming, Macs were practically a no-show except for “light” games, and mobile gaming was ports of 8 bit gaming engines and evolved versions of snake.

No one cared about playing games on the phone, that’s not what they were for, they were for email (Windows CE, Blackberry), messaging, and phone calls. Nokia’s N-Gage platform notwithstanding

Fast forward to today, iOS and Android (phones) own the market that was created when the iPhone was released… that market is called “Casual Games.” There’s been no shortage of debate about how powerful the phones are, and how well they can play games, but without a doubt, nearly everyone plays games on their phones.

These games aren’t typically using the latest whiz-bang graphics, or VR, or or even team play. They’re nothing like what a “gamer” would play. They’re far to uninteresting. The gamer wants wicked refresh rates, absurd FPS, and the latest and greatest GPUs and CPUs with as much memory as possible. Add a VR headset and the requirements increase further.

The casual gamer wants to be able to enjoy themselves, play puzzle games, grow farms, checkers, peer to peer backgammon, and so on. Things that run perfectly on their mobile devices.

What’s happening today is a very similar revolution. Oculus released the Oculus go, powered by what amounts to a mobile phone’s core. They’ve stripped the non-essential software and hardware and put it in the market.

What’s different this time? The Oculus Go leverages a well tuned app store ecosystem, developed with their partners at Samsung while building Gear VR. Why does the app store matter? Says Greg Joswiak, Apple vice president of iOS, iPad and iPhone marketing, in a Rolling Stone story called “Apple: How iPhone Gaming Revolutionized Video Games”

“We thought maybe we’d get 50 apps to start, but on the first day we had 500, and we thought that was an omen. But I’d be lying if I said we thought it would be as revolutionary as it would become. It’s changed the world. It’s changed the way software is written and distributed. It’s changed the gaming industry.”

Simply? Consumers want an easy button. The Oculus Go is incredibly simple, and easy. The Oculus Go is not for the “gamers” among us. It’s a very simple and elegant entry into the consumer VR space. It provides exactly the same experience that the current casual games do on iOS and Android, but in VR. You can play with friends, watch movies and TV, and of course you can do most of it in real time with friends.

Here’s a quote from a friend of mine, and new Go convert/evangelist Elie Finegold: “Got another one today for my wife so we can hang together while I’m traveling.” This comes from our first experience in Oculus Rooms. He and I spent the better part of an hour just chatting and catching up. He was so taken by it, well, you see what happened.

We’re on the edge of something great here. I hope you’ll follow along for more as it unfolds.

Previous Go stories:
New to the Oculus Go? Here are 10 apps to get you started.
Wireless consumer VR: slip it on and Go. Anywhere.

The idea was simple really – a central repository for your digital persona. Create an account with your email address, upload a photo (or photos), and any developer that uses the Gravatar APIs would automatically have access to your data to fill in profile information. It meant you could update and maintain your profile in one place and that data would be updated all over. It’s a one to many internet profile.

The time is now for a multi-dimensional version of this application. Here are a few ideas:

• Open, and decentralized using an IPFS style storage engine
• 3D avatars – as many as the user can create, but only one active at a time
• Support for the major model formats (3ds, max, c4d, maya, blend, obj, fbx)
• All avatars would have a well documented skeletal API for movement controls when used in 3rd party systems
• Tight integration with OpenSVR – the Social VR API
• Character inventory storage and retrieval – think cloud storage for the “bag of holding” with pouches for each application using the APIs.
• Toggles for things like user name display, microphone control, bubbles, and content rating controls
• Enable API based import – Sketchfab -> OpenAvatar with one click.

This concept would allow developers to spend less time building avatar systems, allowing them to focus on the thing that matters most – the experience. Users benefit by having the same avatar everywhere that matters. If you want to play Robo Recall as a fairy princess from wherever… well this makes that possible.

Being able to recognize other players by their avatar across all Social VR experiences would make the experience feel closer to reality. It might seem strange to see a photo realistic avatar in a cartoon world (like Rec Room), but that’s what needs to happen.

What do you think? Leave a comment below?

Here are more stories in the VR category.

The individual titles available are getting more immersive and users are spending hours, hundreds of hours, with HMDs engaged. Game titles like VRChat, Rec Room, and OrbusVR are taking off. Their common theme? They’re Social VR.

Each of the major players in the space have some form of home (or house) as their default location when you dawn the gear. All of them act as launchers for other experiences and applications. Steam VR launches and interacts with the Steam platform, Oculus Home/Dash interact with the Oculus ecosystem, and Microsoft and Sony have their own. Oculus Dash 2 is a step in the right direction, and even has some elements of Ready Player One. But what happens with Vive or Windows Mixed Reality users?

Facebook took a remarkable step last week by opening the once Rift exclusive Facebook Spaces to Vive users. Of course anyone could use it with Revive, but this is official support. It’s a recognition that the combined market is a much larger opportunity. But I digress.

One thing they all have in common is that these core launchers are not social in any way. I can’t invite you to hang out in my Cliff House, then jump into a game of Rec Room together and return the house upon exit. None of them work this way. Why? More importantly, why should they be?

Let’s liberate Social VR and make it open source and cross platform. Not just OS, but dev environment too. Maybe OpenSVR?

What if we could build an open API for Unity, Unreal, and WebXR that remembers the state of a user’s VR experience? As the user exits, this object would collect data about that specific point in time then save a 360 degree “live” image (like Apple’s iOS) of the exit point. It could track play/use over time and dozens of data points that could come in handy.

The 360 degree image captured at the time of exit could wrap the inner sphere of a teleportation portal. We’ve seen a form of this with 360 degree videos in Facebook Spaces. To play the game again, tap the sphere in High Fidelity or your preferred open Social VR platform. To play with friends, have them tap the same sphere, anywhere in the metaverse.

This sounds way harder than it is. This is a layer that gets built into the developer’s tools of choice. Similar things exist for iOS (Game Center) and Android, and Microsoft has the XBOX platform. What I’m proposing is 100% open source.

As we move toward work in VR, shared experiences with friends and colleagues will be transformative to human relationships. This is an important step.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below!

What follows is a short story about each piece, then a video showing how this piece fits today. The concepts, taken as a whole, will form the foundation of an idea that could potentially change how we get things done in real life. It’s worth the read, and it’s a doozy. Grab a cup of your favorite whatever.

As always, if you like this content, please share it so others can enjoy it too. You never know who will read these things… they might be the one to take this and actually change the world.

Input: the human voice.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has taken many forms over the years. We know the keyboard and mouse, the stylus, touch, motion, and now of course we have person to person, or social chat. One of the fastest growing segments in tech is voice recognition, and owning the home of your users. This is voice to text to [internet/cloud/action] to text to voice.

Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa, Microsoft has Cortana, and Google has, well, “Hey Google.” All of these services empower their owners to ask questions about seemingly anything, to change the TV channel, to order more diapers, or close the garage. They’re all early from a technology standpoint, and have varying degrees of friendliness and usability. But the core is here, and they’ll only get better with time.

All you have to do is talk, in your native language, and magic (or algorithms) happens.

Input: plain old text.

Another interface is text to text. We know these as chatbots, and you interact with them through several input channels: Twitter, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and dozens of others. Companies like Conversable are doing a great job in this space: “I’d like a large cheese pizza delivered to my house. Use my saved payment method.”

While one is initiated by voice, and the other by text, they’re just hairs apart from a technology perspective. Speech to text is nothing new, it’s been a work in progress since the earliest times in computing. Add assisted intelligence to the text output, and now we’re cooking.

Need something? Just type it, and the tech will respond.

Input: human emotion.

While voice and text are great inputs, video is an even better input. Recognizing a person has become so trivial that it can be done with a simple API call. Technology can be sure it’s “you” before you interact with it. Microsoft uses this to automatically log you into XBOX with a Kinect device.

More than detecting who you are, computers can also detect emotion in video. This used to require a room at a university, and was only done as a part of a research project. Today, we can accomplish this with just about any standard web cam, or a front facing camera on a smartphone.

We know it’s you, and how you’re feeling at this precise moment. “How can I help, Michael?”

Output: human voice.

Even the best synthesized voices still sound, well, electronic. Enter a new technology from Adobe called “vocal editing.” This tech was demoed at Adobe MAX 2016, and uses a recorded voice to allow the “photoshopping” of that voice.

It’s early, but this tech exists, and could be the voice interaction component of this idea. This demo uses a recording, just a few seconds long. Imagine what would be possible with dozens of hours of training recordings. The only input required after that is text. Text is the primary output of all of today’s Assisted Intelligence (AI) applications, like Watson for example (IBM Watson, How to build a chatbot in 6 minutes). This the next logical step:

This technology could easily be used in real time to allow “bots” to make calls to humans, and the humans would be none the wiser. They could even use your voice, if you allow it to. Bots can take voice as input (voice to text), and output text which gets sent back in the form of audio (text to voice), using this technology.

Any text input, from any source, with one remarkably consistent voice response. Maybe even your own.

Display: character-persistent, animated avatar.

When I had the original idea, the avatar the user interacted with was a simple CGI character, an obviously rendered character that would remove any interaction distraction. I wanted every touch point with the the avatar to be as simple as possible, so you’d spend all of your time focused on the task, and not distracted by its interface. This may still be the best option, but I see that gap closing quickly.

Here’s Faceshift at GDC 2015 (since acquired by Apple), but others (like Faceware, nagapi) exist in the market. Notice two completely different actors playing the same character.

Disney Research Labs has similar technology already in use.

The movie viewer never sees the actor, only the character. With the voice tech above, and a character representation, we’ve removed two persistence problems. Voice and character. Any one (or thing, including AI) can provide consistent human voice, and anyone (sex, build, race, location, whatever) can power the physical representation.

Every single time you interact with the tech, the avatar looks and sounds the same – no matter who the actor is on the other side of the animation.

Display: the human presence.

We’ve seen remarkable leaps forward in what is an age old (in computer years) tech called motion capture. Meat space actors wear a variety of sensors and gadgets to allow computers to record the motion for later use. This used to appear in only the best of the best games and movies. Just about everything you see in major releases today (from a CGI standpoint) is based on motion capture, if it involves humans.

Traditional motion capture was just a part of the process though. Scenes would be shot on a green screen, then through (sometimes) years of perfection, a final movie would grace theater screens or appear in an epic game release.

At Siggraph 2016, Epic Games (makers of the Unreal Engine) featured a new process that amounts to “just in time acting.” Instead of capturing the actors, then using that motion later in scenes, Epic used a process that rendered results in real-time. It’s mind blowing – using the camera in the game engine to record a motion captured actor-in game.

Display: enhanced human presence.

The problem with CGI and humans is something called the uncanny valley: “a computer-generated figure or humanoid robot bearing a near-identical resemblance to a human being arouses a sense of unease or revulsion in the person viewing it.”

Explained in Texan: “Well, it might be close, but it ain’t quite right.” It may be getting close enough.

There are several ways humans protect themselves from attack. One of the simplest is recognizing fellow humans. Sometimes they may want to harm us, other times hug us. But either way, we’re really, really good at recognizing deception.

Until now. This piece was created with Lightwave, Sculptris and Krita, and composited with Davinci Resolve Lite – in 2014 (two years ago).

In 2015, a video was released by USC ICT Graphics Laboratory showing how advanced skin rendering techniques can be deceptively good. Another video by Disney’s Research Hub shows a remarkable technology for rendering eyes. And earlier this year, Nvidia released a new demo of Ira.

Display: enhanced facial reenactment method.

An advancement I didn’t expect to see so soon takes standard digital video footage (a newscast or a YouTube video, for example) and allows an actor, using a standard webcam, to transfer expressions to the target actor. It’s a clever technology.

If the technology works as well as it appears to with simple, low resolution sources, imagine what could be done with professional actors creating 48 hours of source video. That could in turn be targeted by digital actors using a combination of the above video technologies. The interface to this technology would be a recorded human actor with transferred facial expressions from a digital actor, all rendered in real time.

Bringing it all together.

Inputs: voice, text, video, and emotion.

Processing: assisted intelligence, APIs: input to voice.

Outputs: text, human voice, and/or photo realistic CGI/animated characters/human.

But wait. There’s one more thing.

This is great for an AI powered personal assistant. Marrying all of this tech together into one simple and cohesive interface would make everything else feel amateur.

But what if we could add an actual person (or 4) to the mix. Real human beings available 24/7 (in shifts) to note your account, or to call your next appointment to let them know you’ve arrived early? What if your assistant could call the local transit agency, or cancel a flight using voice in whatever the local language happens to be?

All of the technologies mentioned above create and intentional gap between the inputs and outputs, allowing any number of “actors” in between. If a task is suitable for a bot to handle, then a bot should handle it, and reply. If a human is required, the user should never know a human stepped in to take control of the interaction. The voice, text, and display will be 100% the same to protect the experience.

Think about it: any language in (from either side), and your specific language and video representation out. If there were a maximum of four people that knew you more intimately than your family, but you knew you’d never, ever have to think about this problem again, would you do it?

In summary, I’ve outlined a highly personalized virtual assistant, with 100% uptime and omnipresence across every device and interface you have (including VR, but let’s save that for another time).

What you won’t know is whether you’re talking to a human, or machine.

If you liked this, please share it. Your friends will dig it too. Thank you!

Here are the qualifications:

1) You’ve used Apple’s latest iCloud release on the web, desktop, and iOS. That is to say that you have used the latest releases of every iCloud software on web, iOS, and desktop. Note, if you use Windows on the desktop, this does not apply to you at all because the desktop version of iCloud isn’t made for Windows.

2) You’ve recently used Google’s “documents” in any of its forms on the web, and in an iOS app (iPad Pro hopefully). Mostly the latter, because it’s my pain-point. Like, command keys don’t work as expected.

3) You’ve recently used the Microsoft 365 suite, desktop, web, and mobile, all the latest releases.

I don’t store files locally on my computer, so everything must be available on the cloud. My laptop could die, and I wouldn’t miss a beat. That means the interaction with the appropriate web/desktop/iOS filesystems needs to perform, too.

If you match all three qualifications, here is my question: Is there any reason what so ever to continue to suffer through the Google products on iOS (web is fine, but not even close in features) in order to share a few files with people every now and then on the web. When I work on IOS, I dread my documents scenario (Docs/Sheets/Presentation) because the web interfaces on iOS are terrible, and the native iOS apps appear to be calling it in (they don’t feel like they have a product owner that cares).

In my opinion, both iCloud and Microsoft’s iOS products are superior to Google’s in every way imaginable. The reason I’m not 100% sold on Microsoft is that I have a split scenario right now where about 75% of my stuff is on Google’s cloud, and the other 25% is in iCloud. There is very, very little in Office 365.

Remember, there are three qualifications here before you comment. If you don’t qualify, and you comment, it’ll be like you explaining to me how easy it is to write code, having never written a line yourself.

Comments? Thank you!