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NextFest

Posted by michael on from the meet-george-jetson dept.

anzha writes "This Saturday and Sunday between 9 and 6 pm at the Fort Mason Center's Festival Pavilion in San Francisco, NextFest will be taking place. Organized by Wired and sponsored by HP, The SF Chronicle, General Electric, General Motors, and many others, this is an expo on 'almost there' technologies. Ranging from [in]famous Moller aircar to a 'transparent cloak' from the Tachi Lab at Tokyo University to antibacterial powders from Canada to many, many others. Read more here."

3 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. More info by Capt'n+Hector · · Score: 4, Informative
    A BBC Article on that invisibility cloak.

    Moller website.

    Links are good, people!

    --
    Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
    Africus aut Europaeus?
  2. Re:Contradiction? by Carnildo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh, also, Isn't retro-reflective redundant? Doesn't reflection pretty much imply sending light back in the direction it came?

    No. Classic reflection (the sort normal mirrors do) involves light heading off in a direction other than the one it was originally going in -- "angle of incidence equals angle of reflection". Retroreflection involves things like corner mirrors and sends light back in a direction exactly opposite the one it was originally headed in.

    --
    "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
  3. It's not a scam by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Moller's been been taking investors' money for decades, and has exactly squat to show for it.

    It's true that he has been taking money from investors for decades, but he's been pouring his own money into it as well. He made about $20 million from real estate investment and millions more from his invention of the SuperTrapp muffler. He invested that in his company. So while it's true that he has been taking money from others, he hasn't been getting rich from it, as the word "scam" implies.

    Credible aerospace engineers say that, unless Moller's invented a radically new, ultra-compact engine, there's no way you can move enough air mass to actually lift the thing.

    Dr. Moller is a credible aerospace engineer. He is the started the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at UC Davis. And he has invented a new type of engine for the SkyCar.

    The spiffy model on the showroom floor is nothing more than a stage prop. It doesn't fly, it never did, and it probably never will.

    As someone else pointed out, there have been tethered tests that have shown that the thing can at least hover.

    Don't get me wrong. I think that Moller's claims are continually over-optimistic, even to the point that he got in trouble with the SEC for misleading investors. He's been over-promising and under-delivering for decades. But he has made slow, painful progress, and I've seen every indication that he really does believe in what he's doing.

    To call it a scam is completely unfair.