chris bator

Content strategy | motion and interaction design since the turn of the century. 360 video post | whiskey | local food | #NFT #sfws

[UploadVR @UploadVR]

X-Plane 12 and iRacing are now officially playable in VR on Apple Vision Pro, streamed from your PC, with your physical accessories blended in using camera passthrough.

Details here: https://t.co/NGqJnAFBWL

[chris bator @chrisbator]

@Scobleizer those shakes are amazing

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

The reeducation of an AI influencer. Me.

Lately I am questioning all my assumptions.

Part of that is just watching the AI and robotics industry in a constant state of radical change. Change that just is hard to predict.

Nine months ago how many knew what a Hermes or OpenClaw was? This week both got featured at industry conferences this week alone.

So I am meeting with founders more just to talk and get a new education with no expectations of recording video.

Axel Peytavin, @ax_pey, founder of @innate_bot, has been so nice to me over the years (he has me over when his company was a bedroom in his home).

So today we just went for a nice walk and got some shakes at Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto.

He is working on a speech he will give in a couple of weeks where he will lay out that we are thinking about robotics in too limiting a way.

Too rah rah about humanoids. Too focused on trying to take people’s jobs. Too addicted to dancing videos, and too focused on “useful” tasks.

And not enough on the sheer joy of getting machines to do fun things, like sit down and play chess with us.

When he told me that it reminded me of my childhood. Computers were only for “serious” users in corporations.

A big part of that back in the 1970s was that computers were so expensive only profitable companies could afford them.

Reminds me of when Doug Engelbart told me he got fired in the early 1970s from the research lab, SRI, where he invented the mouse. Because he dreamed of a day when everyone would have a cheap supercomputer in their hands and back then such a thing seemed unreachable.

Axel is a similar dreamer. He dreams of a day when we will have a “Star Wars cantina bar” with a variety of robots that can be changed, or easily taught, to do fun things.

Recently I visited a San Francisco hackathon at @ycombinator where one team built a system for one of his robots that would 3D print a new tool for one of his robots and it would go over, take the tool out of the printer, and do something new, all run by an agentic system that identified a new need.

He sees a new category of personal robots evolving now that are much lower cost than the Teslas, Figures, and 1x_tech humanoids. He sees the engineering efforts to get legs working makes them too expensive, and too hard to make safe for homes. “You have seen the videos of them falling, right?@

He sees those as too difficult to generalize for years to get in our homes so is headed in a different direction. For now.

We spent much of the time while slurping down the best shakes in Silicon Valley (believe me I have tried them all) talking about the beginnings of the personal computer market when Apple started up.

Woz’s bosses were so stuck to the dominant belief of the day that they turned him down five times when he begged them to make a personal computer.

As we were talking I realized I am stuck similarly into thinking only big companies can change the world with robotics.

He did that to remind me that the Apple II couldn’t do much and was very expensive when it first arrived, yet set up a platform where people could build new things. Spreadsheets came within a couple of years.

About to go to another robotics dinner with a new vision of where the future could go.

Has me dreaming about a future where robots and AI is for fun, and giving us humans new capabilities, not about taking our jobs.

My reeducation continues.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

Why is Trump spending so much time attacking our educators?

My friend Randi Weingarten has the answer.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

The sun is fascinating to watch. This timelapse was recorded using a modified telescope designed to safely observe the solar chromosphere, captured over a period of several hours from my backyard in Arizona.

The entire Earth would be a small dot at this distance of ~93M miles.

[Nathie 🔜 AWE @NathieVR]

I've spent the last few weeks testing the best apps and features on my Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. Here's what I learned.

Full video: https://t.co/szs2rguSGa

[chris bator @chrisbator]

@MikeJY1984 @veefriends That’s a lot of goats!!!!!!!!!!

[Spencer Althouse @SpencerAlthouse]

this was so sweet. Stephen Colbert just ended his final episode of The Late Show while singing "Hello, Goodbye" with Paul McCartney. his family and the show's crew then joined them on stage before Paul turned off the lights to the Ed Sullivan Theater

[Spatial Insider @spatialinsider]

Working with Apple on an Apple Immersive Video is unlike anything else in filmmaking.

Elite freediver Ant Williams shares his behind the scenes experience filming Ice Dive from Apple’s Adventure series on Apple Vision Pro. Full episode linked below.

[How To AI @HowToAI_]

Microsoft has released a 4B parameter model that turns any image into a 3D asset in 3 seconds.

It uses a new geometry format called O-Voxel that converts to a textured mesh in under 100ms on CUDA.

Outputs GLB files with full PBR textures, ready for Blender, Unity, and Unreal.

100% Open Source.

[Nathie 🔜 AWE @NathieVR]

The physics and reflections on Apple Vision Pro still feel unreal.

[Nainsi Dwivedi @NainsiDwiv50980]

We are entering the era of “prompt-to-simulation.”

Someone built an AI-powered particle engine that turns plain English into real-time 3D visualizations directly in the browser.

You describe an idea.
The system generates the particle simulation.
Then exports it as HTML, React, or Three.js code.

No Blender workflow.
No manually tuning thousands of particles.
No complex shader setup.

Just imagination → prompt → interactive simulation.

What’s interesting isn’t just the visuals.

It’s that AI is starting to become a creative physics engine:

→ generating motion
→ designing behaviors
→ creating interactive worlds
→ translating ideas into executable graphics

The line between “developer,” “designer,” and “artist” is disappearing fast.

Soon people won’t build visual experiences from scratch.

They’ll direct them.

[Gagan Ghotra @gaganghotra_]

🚨 JUST IN - Google published a long piece about "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search" 👀

A lot in it https://t.co/22t75EtwUH

🧵

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A teacher at a private high school was doing something on her laptop during her free period.

Took me a second to realize what I was looking at.

She had NotebookLM open with 8 years of student essays, exam responses, and feedback uploaded.

Here's what she was actually doing.

She pasted in a fresh student essay and ran one prompt: "Compare this student's writing to their submissions from the last 3 years. Show me exactly which weaknesses have improved, which have stayed the same, and which new patterns are appearing."

What used to take her a full weekend of comparing folders came back in 45 seconds.

But that wasn't the part that broke my brain.

She uploads every state exam from the last decade into a separate notebook.

Then asks: "What question types are showing up more often each year and which topics are quietly disappearing from the test?"

She walks into every lesson already knowing what the test is going to look like before the curriculum committee does.

I asked her how long she'd been doing this.

"Since I realized I was teaching to a version of the exam that stopped existing 4 years ago."

Her students' pass rate is up. Her grading time is down 70%.

Her principal thinks she just has a sixth sense for the curriculum.

She told me the sense is real.

She just has a 10-year memory that never forgets a question pattern.

[New York Post @nypost]

Trading cards are now a $50 billion global industry - and their comeback is just getting started https://t.co/pOTsFkWIvL

[chris bator @chrisbator]

@Scobleizer This will quickly expose poorly managed companies.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

President Obama on Iran: “We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of their enriched uranium out. There’s no dispute that it worked and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz”

[chris bator @chrisbator]

@whiskycast Cool, never saw that box. Mine had a gold tube.

[Ray Harryhausen @Ray_Harryhausen]

Thank you to everybody who has enquired about the next location of our ‘Ray Harryhausen: Miniature Models of the Silver Screen’ US exhibition, after an incredible 7 months at @museumofminis in Tucson.

We are delighted to announce that this exhibition will be next be displayed at Verko's Vault in Las Vegas, Nevada- opening Fall 2026.

https://t.co/f3rlsSHq1R

Keep an eye on our social media accounts for further dates and information!

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

“I still love you even though you are a dummy,” Maryam told me as she gave me a needed hug this morning after I wished her happy Mother’s Day.

Yesterday’s social hack wherei basically gave a caller access to everything really is a lesson about my own hubris.

I tell everyone “don’t believe anyone calling you.”

Yet I did, letting them have the keys to my life. They deleted videos. I will repost what I can. Am still kicked off of @bluesky. Caused me a lot of humiliation and pain.

I made a mistake that cost yesterday.

Playing it back.

Once you take a call and think it might be real you are done.

They will send you emails and have the ability to keep convincing you they are real.

I thought they were real and so did my friend who was in the car with me.

All the way until I posted yesterday.

In all tragedies, there are good sides.

My clean installed Mac sure is fast today and Maryam is having some fun at my expense.

Happy Mother’s Day.