At some point in time we have all dreamed of being someone else or somewhere else. When you read a fantasy book that felt so real, you wished you could go to that place. Or maybe you were watching a professional sporting event and imagined that it was you who was making that slam dunk, homerun, impossible goal, or touchdown. That time at your first job when you dropped something, the entire room looked at you, and you just wished the floor would open up so you could be anywhere else. Video games give us the opportunity to escape reality, and with the growth of extended reality technologies, escaping our reality can feel ever more real. On this episode of WMD, two of Dr. Schwartz’s students from the York College of Pennsylvania, Sebastian Suriel-Diaz and Chase Shelton discuss how virtual, augmented, and extended reality are changing the video game experience.

We live in an age of surveillance, but few of us pay attention to exactly how closely we are being tracked. Devices like the Ring doorbell, the Apple Watch, Google’s search engine, and the smartphone in your pocket provide location, imagery, voice, interest, and health data. Social media provides the same. Few people, if anyone, read the user agreements in detail to find out exactly how that user data is being monetized by the companies that build those devices and software. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz hands off the microphone to three cybersecurity management students here at the York College of Pennsylvania: Nevin Ferry, Jesse Bitzer, and Brooks Almond, as they head to campus to ask their fellow students about their privacy and whether or not they understand what’s in the user agreements for the social media apps they use.

The sex tech industry is a recognized early adopter of emerging technology and driver of innovation. In fact, ecommerce and bandwidth technology are two examples of innovations that came from the sex tech industry. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz hands off the hosting microphone to Neisha Pierre, a cybersecurity management major and her cohost, Paul Gentile, both students here at the York College of Pennsylvania, as they explore how artificial intelligence and robotics are changing the world, with a particular focus on the use of AI and robots in the sex tech industry. This episode includes some explicit content.