Episode 009 – Getting started in Spatial AI

What this episode covers

HOSTS AB – Andrew BallardSpatial AI Specialist at Leidos.Robotics & AI defence research.Creator of SPAITIAL Helena MerschdorfGeospatial Marketing/Branding at Tales Consulting.Undertaking her PhD in Geoinformatics & GIScience. Mirek BurkonCEO at Phantom Cybernetics.Creator of Augmented Robotality AR-OS. Violet WhitneyAdj. Prof. at U.MichSpatial AI insights on Medium.Co-founder of Spatial Pixel. William MartinDirector of AI at ConsensysAdj. Prof. at Columbia.Co-founder of Spatial Pixel. Welcome to SPAITIAL. This episode is a deep dive all on its own. This week we’re covering the rather gnarly but important topic of how do you get started with Spatial AI? The field is changing so rapidly. If you’re already on the leading edge, then congratulations, The burning question of today is how do you get there? How do get close? Close to – I won’t say leading-edge – close to watching the edge, but then a deeper dive. How does someone fast follow? How do you catch up? Open question! Who’d like to go first? I can see a lot of people with a lot experience here in this chat. AB 01:10Violet: could you give us a bit of a brain dump of your experience of watching this field and then go around again for catching up? Go for it. Violet 01:19Sounds great. I kind of stumbled into this field because I started in architecture which has a lot of 3D stuff. It has a lotta modeling and simulation. But then ended up getting really interested in the way we interact with physical spaces. So I wanted to get out of the digital simulation world. I had been at Google on this product for generative design. And so that was all simulation-based. But I was really interested in sensors and the tangible world and physical computing. So I chased after that really, Creating a new class for that so that I could start to learn more about it. And so I guess my biggest advice for like making the jump into something like Spatial AI is I think you need to find what you’re really interested in and carve out that niche for yourself by just starting to learn more about it, work on the tools. Like for me, when I started getting into this, I don’t think I had much upper hand other than the fact that I had been working in the simulation space, but I didn’t really understand sensors or how to merge the physical world really other than any experience I have from fabricating things in architecture. So, I think the best way to ramp up is just to start playing with the tools. So for us, it’s spending a lot of time having ideas about specific projects. “Oh, could we start to use something like OpenAI to have more natural interactions?” “Oh let me play with this gesture library and see if I can combine that with speech.” And so I think you have to allow yourself a little bit of freedom to be a novice. There are so many people being novices trying to learn how these things behave. And we have really just poke and prod at the tools and what talks to what and what does and what emergent properties does it have. So I think you just kind of have to chase what you want to do and get muddy. So I think you just kind of have to chase what you want to do and get muddy. Violet AB 03:45Get muddy indeed. Helena you’re definitely possibly in that muddy field you’ve been playing in the geospatial world. Not only have you been able to go ahead and do some deep research but you also then take your clients through that kind of journey. How do you sort of get them pushed up that hill without – you know – dragging them up the hill. How do you do it politely? Helena 04:08So it’s a bit interesting, because I’m actually quite the opposite approach of what Violet’s just outlined with playing with the tools and kind of taking that technology-first approach as a kind of a front to what m

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